


Nephila

by Kelyon



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Adoption, F/M, Giant Spiders, Other, Unplanned Pregnancy, Xenophilia, monster fucking, trigger warning sheep murder
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-01-07 22:28:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21225257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kelyon/pseuds/Kelyon
Summary: Naturalist Belle French is called out to find the thing that has been killing sheep. What she finds will change her life.*Winner of the 2019 T.E.A. category "Rumbelle Monsterfuckers Ball"*





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wayamy27narf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wayamy27narf/gifts).

> My contribution to the Rumbelle Monsterfucker's Ball
> 
> A surprising amount of this is based on fact. 
> 
> Though I'm sure there are inaccuracies regarding academic institutions and Australian sheep grazing, my research was mostly focused on the spider stuff.
> 
> (Obviously, warnings for spiders. There also some non-graphic depictions of dead sheep, if that's going to upset anyone.)

"_ Nephila _ is a genus of araneomorph spiders noted for the impressive webs they weave. _ Nephila _ consists of numerous species found in warmer regions around the world. They are commonly called golden silk orb-weavers, golden orb-weavers, giant wood spiders, or banana spiders.

"The genus name _ Nephila _ is derived from Ancient Greek, meaning "fond of spinning.""

****  


Even for late August, it was stupidly hot. Belle French trudged across the stupidly designed quad of the University of Maine’s Storybrooke Campus. The cardigan she had stupidly worn as part of her “first day of school as an adjunct professor” outfit stuck to her back. The sweater was further pressed against her body by the leather strap of the bag she had stupidly slung over her shoulder. And the bag was heavy with five classes worth of “getting to know you” one-page essays she had stupidly assigned her undergraduates and--most stupidly of all--promised to return for credit next class. 

She was the professor, goddamit, why was _ she _ the one with homework?

“Belle! _ Belle! _” 

Belle heard the running almost before she heard the voice calling after her. She stopped and turned and saw Ruby Lucas sprinting towards her. In the years she’d known Ruby, Belle had seen her run in everything from sneakers to stilettos to those “barefoot running” foot gloves, but she had never seen her friend look as winded as she did right now.

“What’s going on?” Belle asked as Ruby got closer. “Is there an emergency? Is your grandmother okay?”

Ruby shook her head and gulped down air before she started talking. “Wheren.... Aus... la...ufrum?”

Belle blinked at her friend. “You want to run that by me again?”

With her hands on her knees, Ruby took another deep breath, which only improved things by a fraction. “Where in... _ Australia… _ are... you from?

“Melbourne,” Belle answered, then added, “Did you run all the way from the Bio Building just to ask me that?”

“No,” Ruby panted, her mind clearly going faster than her breath would allow. “The next thing I wanna know is, how far is Melbourne from Queensland?”

Belle gaped at her friend. What was going on? “What part of Queensland? It’s a big state.”

“I don’t know what part. But if you go to Queensland, can you crash with your parents?”

“I--No?” Belle gathered herself and squashed down her incredulity. “Ruby, that’s like asking if my parents can stay with me here in Maine while they stop down and go to Disney World! Now will you tell me what’s going on? Why do we need emergency trivia about Australian geography?”

“Bio department got a call,” Ruby huffed. “The University of Brisbane is looking for field agents for a job, but they don’t want any specialists.”

Belle’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

Ruby nodded. “I know! It’s weird. It sounds like they’re looking for general zoologists.” She put her hand meaningfully on Belle’s shoulder. “Like _ someone _ who still hasn’t picked out a specific branch of study even though she’s well into her doctoral process!”

Unlike Ruby--who had decided in middle school that lupine biology was her passion and had never strayed from that course--Belle had yet to find a specialization that she could stick with. All animals were equally fascinating to her--from bison to crocodiles to arachnids--and she had spent countless credit hours in one field, only to find her enthusiasm building for another subject. She had gotten through her bachelor’s and master’s degrees by taking basic classes and calling herself a generalist. After all, zoology was a legitimate discipline all by itself. Even if specialization was more likely to offer job prospects.

But… _ this _ was a job prospect. Wasn’t it?

“Why does the University of Brisbane want an unspecialized naturalist?”

Ruby handed Belle a piece of paper with a phone number scrawled on it. “I guess you’ll have to ask them when you get there.”

****

Four weeks, three interviews, and one extended leave of absence later, Belle got off the plane at the Mount Isa Airport. She was met by a short, gruff-looking man from the university. He took her bags and threw them in the back of a dust-covered Jeep.

“This is the real outback, isn’t it?” Belle shouted as they drove along a bumpy road. The loud Jeep pulled up clouds of red dust as it went.

“Not really,” the man yelled over the noise. He hadn’t introduced himself, but he wore an ID badge that said Leroy. “But it’s close enough that tourists can’t tell the difference!”

“I’m really not a tourist!” Belle grabbed onto the dashboard as the Jeep jolted over some unidentifiable obstacle in the road. “I’m with the university!”

“I know! You’re gonna find what’s killing the sheep!”

“Is that what this is about?” In all her briefings on this assignment, Belle still hadn’t been told _ why _ they needed someone who had no specialty.

Leroy pulled off the road and onto a paved driveway that eventually led up to a massive house.

“This property belongs to Mary Margaret and David Nolan,” he said when he cut the engine. “They’re sheep graziers, and they’ve noticed a diminishing return on their flock. Usually, they’d call it dingos and move on. But the shepherds aren’t finding bones or carcasses. They’re finding bodies, but they haven’t been eaten. There are only ever two bites on a sheep.”

Leroy hadn’t looked at Belle much on their ride to the Nolan station, but now as he sat in the parked Jeep with his hands on the steering wheel, he turned and looked her dead in the eyes. “They look like fang marks.”

“Well, God knows there are enough venomous animals on this continent. We have a list of usual suspects. What kind of snakes live in this area?”

“Sister,” Leroy opened his door. “I’ve lived in these parts for twenty years, I’ve never seen anything do damage like this.”

He took her bag out of the Jeep and lead her to an outbuilding off the side of the main house. The edge of a folded-over blue tarp flapped in the wind on the ground outside, though most of the material was weighed down by an object hidden inside the fold.

Leroy stood over the tarp, but looked at her before he lifted it. “Are you ready to look at this?”

Belle swallowed her fear and squared her jaw. “Of course I’m ready. I’m a professional.” 

“Okay.”

It was definitely a sheep, that thing on the tarp. And it was definitely dead. Belle couldn’t help but feel sorry for the animal’s untimely demise. Her heart and stomach both wrenched at the sight of its lifeless eyes, its stiff limbs and unnaturally twisted neck.

The condition of the animal was as Leroy had described: it wasn’t eaten or dismembered. The sheep didn’t even look as though it had been attacked--at least, not by anything with ripping claws or crushing mandibles.

But there were marks on the sheep. On the neck, about ten centimeters apart, there were two deep incisions. Belle got a pair of rubber gloves out of her bag and examined the marks. The whole of her hand fit in the space between the holes. She could fit two fingers inside of the wounds, they were deep enough to go up to her second knuckle.

“That’s definitely not a snake,” Belle said. She turned to Leroy. “Are you sure this was an animal? Do the Nolans have enemies? This could just be the work of some really sick human.” 

A new voice entered the conversation. “You really think a person is capable of that kind of torture to a helpless animal?”

Belle straightened up and looked at the new speaker. He was a tall man in khakis and a bush hat, an outfit that should have been practical, but just made him look like he was dressing up as Crocodile Dundee. He had spoken with an American accent, so it was entirely possible that he _ had _, in fact, bought a new wardrobe in order to appear “authentic” for his trip “down under.” 

Folding her arms over her chest, Belle gave the man a look of incredulous disdain. “It can’t be a controversial opinion that in most conflicts between men and beasts, humans are the aggressors.”

The tall man laughed, an obnoxiously boisterous sound. He clapped Leroy on the back, as though he were a pint-sized sidekick. Leroy glared at him and shook off his hand. 

“Miss French, this is your expedition partner.”

“Clay Gaston,” the man extended his hand. He had a very white smile “I knew I was the braun to your brain, but no one mentioned your beauty!”

Belle shook his hand for just long enough to be polite and then pulled away. She decided to ignore the remark about her looks. “I’m Belle French, one-woman co-oprative between the Universities of Maine and Brisbane. Are you associated with an institute?” 

Mr. Gaston shook his head. “I’m a big game hunter, the Nolans hired me to kill whatever you find. No beast alive stands a chance against me. And no girl for that matter!” He gave another smile that Belle officially classified as ‘shit-eating.’

This was going to be a long, stupid, trip.

****

The next morning, after breakfasting with the Nolans and getting a few more answers than she’d had before, Belle set out to find her sheep attacker. The couple said that all the sheep with fang marks had been found within a hundred meters of an abandoned mine. Of course, the entire area was littered with old mine shafts, so that only sort of narrowed down the possibilities. But it was something to go on, at least.

Squinting in the merciless sun as she left the main house, Belle couldn’t quite believe that Gaston was sitting behind the wheel of the Jeep.

“Isn’t Leroy the driver around here?”

“Three’s a crowd,” Gaston said. “I drove around this ranch for a few days before you got here, I can get you where you need to go.”

“It’s called a station,” Belle muttered as she walked around the Jeep to get in the passenger side. 

When she climbed in, Belle saw a long rifle laying across the back seat. How had Gaston gotten _ that _ through customs? She gaped at it, then turned to Gaston. “Tell me that’s a tranquilizer gun.” 

The man scoffed and started the Jeep before Belle had her seatbelt on. “The Nolans hired us to get rid of the thing that’s killing their sheep. Your part is to tell me what to shoot at. I’ll take care of the rest.”

The sight of the gun and Gaston’s cavalier attitude about this whole expedition gave Belle a stomach ache. But she shook her head and tried to focus on their mission.

“So what’s your plan, Mr. Gaston?”

“Follow the mine shafts,” he said. At least he kept his eyes on the road. “If we find a body, we can try to track whatever killed it. If all goes well, we’ll find the thing, kill it, and bring the body back to the Nolans tonight. If that doesn’t work, we’ll go back and try something else tomorrow.”

In the vast catalogue of “bad plans,” that wasn’t the worst. Belle reminded herself that Gaston was a professional hunter and tracker. And the same people who had hired her had also hired him. He _ couldn’t _ be as much of an idiot as he seemed. 

After an hour in the dusty wasteland, Belle spotted a white lump in the distance. Gaston drove the Jeep off the dirt road and pulled up to the animal. With her rubber gloves covering her to the wrist, Belle examined the carcass. Like the one on the tarp back at the station, this sheep was uninjured except for two red puncture wounds. 

Unlike the sheep at the station, this one was still warm.

“It’s close,” Belle said. The sheep’s blood was still wet and tacky on her gloves. She hastily removed them. “You think it’s in the mine?”

Gaston made a show of looking around the flat expanse around them. “Something this big can’t just hide behind a bush. If we don’t see it, it’s not on the surface.”

Belle exhaled slowly through her nose. He wasn’t wrong. There was a hole in the ground only a few meters away from where they stood, where the sheep had been attacked. They were right on top of a mine. Something could have very easily come up from the ground, attacked the sheep, and run back home.

“But it doesn’t make sense,” Belle muttered. “Why would an animal kill a sheep and not eat it?”

Gaston shrugged. “Maybe it thought the sheep was something else? Like, sharks think that people are seals when they bite them.”

“Maybe,” Belle said. “But what does it want instead? And how would it know that there was prey but not know what it was?”

Her brow furrowed in against the sunlight, Belle squinted down at the sheep. There was something glinting beside the carcass. Belle crouched down to get a closer look. The sparkling thing was gold against the red dirt. 

“Is that jewelry?” A dropped necklace would be evidence that this senseless slaughter was in fact the work of people--maybe some cruel teenagers or the Nolan’s cutthroat rivals.

But when Belle examined the thing, she saw that it wasn’t any kind of chain. It was thin as a hair, at risk of blowing away in the wind. It almost looked like some kind of golden thread. 

“Are we going to the mine or what?” Gaston said.

Still squinting, Belle followed the line of the thread as it wove around the sheep and over the brush and into the hole in the ground. She stood up and slapped the dust off her shorts. 

“I think we have to,” Belle said. Though the animal’s access point was right in front of them, Belle had no interest in rappelling from a hole in the ground down into the unknown. She turned to look down the dirt road, and then back at Gaston. “Where’s the entrance?”

****

The mine was dark and cavernous. The entrance had been at ground level, a few hundred meters away from where they had found the sheep. As they went on, the path sloped steeply downwards into the earth. The only light came from their battery-operated torches. Belle held her light in one hand and left the other hand free as she walked. Gaston had an LED light mounted on his shoulder and used both hands to hold his rifle. The LEDs gave off a cold, bluish light that gave Belle a headache. She’d had her torch since she was a kid, and it gave off a warm yellow glow that made it easier to trace the gold-colored threads that hung all around the stone mine walls. 

“I can’t tell if I’m Orpheus or Theseus,” Belle remarked. “Descending into the underworld, but following a golden thread so I don’t get lost in the maze.”

“Is that from a movie or something?”

Belle opened her mouth, but then decided it wasn’t worth it.

There was nothing alive in the mines. In the light of her torch, Belle didn’t see any signs of animals--no bones or scat or likely habitats. There was nothing here but dust and rocks and strands of golden thread. As they went deeper into the mines, the threads became more frequent, the spacing of them denser and harder to avoid. Weaving around each other over and over, the threads almost seemed to form a narrow tunnel.

Gaston ducked, but couldn’t avoid scraping his head against the threads. He pulled the gold out of his black hair and grimaced at the sticky strands. “This isn’t real gold, is it? We’re not literally walking through a gold mine?”

“No,” Belle said. “Honestly, these look like cobwebs more than anything else.”

Giving up the subtle approach, Gaston used the butt of his rifle to clear away the rest of the tunnel. “You think a spider did all this?”

They emerged into a vast space, like a cathedral in the middle of the mine. There were a few boarded-up mine shafts above their heads, letting in narrow beams of sunlight. Looking up, Belle realized just how far under the ground they were.

Then the beam of her torch caught the golden threads again. But the threads were no longer sparse trails, or even the dense mass of the tunnel. Now they formed a sprawling, asymmetrical web that covered the entire space of the cavern. Belle and Gaston both looked up at it, gaping.

“Yeah,” Belle said. “I think that’s a spider’s work.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Gaston swallow. “A spider that’s big enough to kill sheep but not hungry enough to eat them.” 

Belle nodded. “I wonder what it _ really _ wants.”

She didn’t see what happened next. Her first sensation was of motion beside her, of Gaston falling over and shouting out, “Oof!” Then a hard _ crunch _ and half the light went out. All the illumination from the LEDs vanished. 

A man screamed. Gaston! Belle swept her yellow beam over the ground, frantically searching for him.

But he wasn’t on the ground.

She saw him, five meters up in the air, his body already wrapped up like a mummy and dangling by a golden thread. He was struggling to break free, but with every second, Belle could see his movements become weaker and more disjointed. In no time at all, he was still.

When Gaston’s wrapped-up body spun around, Belle saw two large fang marks on his shoulder. She screamed.

“Shhhh,” a raspy voice came from the dimness. “Don’t make noise.”

Belle swung her torch all over the room. “Who’s there? Where are you?”

“My home,” the voice said. “You trespassed.” 

Heart pounding, Belle tried to stay calm. “Your home?” she asked, still looking for the source of the voice. “You live here? With that spider around?”

“Not a spider,” was the only answer. “Spiders are small.”

Belle worked very hard to keep her panting from becoming hyperventilating. “Then what killed Mr. Gaston?” 

“Not killed,” came the sound of the voice. A voice Belle could no longer swear was human. “Not yet. You should go before I eat him.”

Gason wasn’t dead? And the thing in the mine with her was going to eat him? “Wait!” Belle thrust a pleading hand into the darkness. “Take me instead!”

In the dim light, she saw the outline of a creature. It stayed in the shadows, but she could make out a head cocking to one side. It was looking at her. 

“You?” the inhuman voice asked “You would… take his place?”

Belle fought to keep the fear out of her voice. “If I did, would you let him go? _ Could _ you let him go?”

An appendage came from out of the shadows and prodded at Gaston’s limp body. Then it discarded him, and turned to Belle. She could hear many legs moving in the darkness, coming closer to her. 

“Why?” The creature’s voice was high and low at the same time. It was a chirp with deep and menacing echoes. 

“I can’t go back without him. He’s my responsibility. I have to protect him.”

“You?” it said again. “You so small, so weak? He should protect you.”

“He tried and you see where that got us.” Belle nodded to Gaston’s rifle. It had been knocked out of his hands before they had even seen the creature. 

“So,” it hissed, “to save your male, you would feed me? Let me bite you?”

“You wouldn’t even need to use your venom.” Belle ignored the urge to vomit as she discussed her own slaughter. “I’m small enough that I think you could just eat me. If your physiology is the same as the smaller species in your genus.”

“That’s personal information,” the monster said stiffly. 

“I wouldn’t even fight you, at least I’d try not to. I--” It took a moment for Belle to make sense of what the thing had just said. “Was that a joke?”

“Hmm?”

“W-when I mentioned your genus, you said that was personal. Was that humor?”

It made a sound then, a high-pitched twitter that repeated a few times. After a moment, Belle realized it was laughter. This monster could speak English. It could hold a conversation. It could make a joke. 

This thing in the cave was more intelligent than most of her undergraduates. 

With a bizarre sense of relief--even though the danger was far from over--Belle began to laugh as well. This was just one of those days, wasn’t it? Like her favorite comedian said, adult life is already so goddamned weird, _ this _ might as well happen. 

The creature stopped laughing and Belle became aware of it looking at her again. 

“I don’t have to eat,” it said. “Not if other needs are met.”

“Really?” Belle asked. “Will you let us both go? Will you stop killing the sheep?”

“Other needs,” it repeated. “Must be met.”

Belle gulped. “Okay. Um.”

“Pretty human.” Was she nuts or did the creature sound thoughtful? “Pretty human wants her male to go free.”

“Yes,” Belle whispered. “No matter what, don’t eat Gaston.”

“No,” it agreed. “Ugly human stinks. No good for anything.”

“But,” she made herself say it. “You can eat me.”

“Yes,” the creature hissed. “I can. Or.”  
It didn’t finish the sentence.

“Or?” Belle asked. “Or what?”

“Or you can choose, pretty human.”

Belle’s hands clenched into fists. “Tell me what I can choose.”

“Choose,” it said, “what you will be. Will you be meal? Or.” It waited again, waited an eternity before it gave Belle the second option. “Will you be mate?”

For a very, very long moment, Belle didn’t remember to breathe. She stood in the dark cave, in the beam of her torch, surrounded by golden webs, every bit as paralyzed as Gaston. Her mouth opened and closed. Her lips tried to form words but no sound would come out of them. 

“W-w-what do you mean by ‘mate’?”

The sound the monster made was simultaneously amused and lustful. “Females should be bigger,” it said. “Ten times bigger than males! I should be afraid of you. Instead, you are afraid of me.”

“I am,” Belle admitted. “I’m afraid of things I don’t know, things I don’t understand.” She took a deep breath. “But I’ve found a pretty easy way to get over those fears.”

“Oh?” She could hear the creature scuttling in the darkness. It seemed to be all around her, examining her from every angle. 

“Yes,” she gulped. “Usually, I stop being afraid once I know more about the thing that scares me.”

Research had long been her weapon against a world that didn’t make sense. If she knew enough about a danger, then she knew how to avoid it, or how to survive it. It was an attitude she found common in doctors and economists, and naturalists like herself. All the good ones, anyway. They believed that forewarned is forearmed. 

Of course, the other side of that coin was _ someone _ had to have the first-hand experience that went into the books that future generations used for research. It was all well and good to arm yourself with knowledge, but at a certain point, if you were really serious about advancing science, you had to do something no one else had ever done. You had to do the brave thing, even if only so future generations could look at your work and see what _ not _ to do.

It was pretty clearly documented what happened to the prey of _ nephila _. Belle herself could confirm the process of paralyzing a victim through venom and wrapping it in silk for later consumption. The creature had already done all of that to Gaston. If she agreed to be the creature’s meal, it would do that to her, and she would also get a first-hand view of its devouring behavior and digestive processes, though any notes she might make on such matters would surely be lost to science forever.

But did anyone know what happened to a human body in the process of arachnid copulation? What _ could _ happen, under those circumstances? Science had never found a specimen as large as the one that had made the webs in this cave. Science had never come across an invertebrate that expressed a sexual interest in humans. 

Now, Belle had both.

Besides, she had been hired specifically to find the thing that had been killing the Nolan’s sheep and to get it to stop. This creature seemed to be killing without feeding out of misplaced sexual energy. Surely, the most logical method of saving the sheep was to get the creature to expend that sexual energy. On her. 

This was the discovery of a lifetime. This would provide groundbreaking data for twenty different fields of study. This was literally her job. Who else would ever have this chance? Who else would ever take it? She had to do it. For the sake of the Nolans’ sheep, for the sake of Gaston’s life, for the sake of her own intellectual integrity, she had to fuck this monster.

“Well?” the voice came from the shadows, even more hushed than before. “Choice?”

Belle swallowed. It was one thing to see the rightness in doing something, but it was another thing entirely to actually do it. Besides, there was one more thing she had to know before she gave it her answer. 

“Step into the light.”

It did as she asked. One leg emerged from the shadows, then another, and another. The legs rested on thin points that gradually tapered up to joints and grew thicker from there. From the way it teetered on its points, Belle could tell that this creature didn’t usually stand on the ground. It was a weaver, after all. It was most comfortable in its web. 

The points of the legs were dark brown, but halfway up the colors changed to include a band of yellowish gold before it turned dark again. Every leg had that coloration, it was a sign to evoke fear in potential predators. A warning, that this thing was venomous. 

A warning Belle and Gaston would have done well to heed.

Belle looked up the height of the creature, at the legs that just kept _ going _ , until high above her head, she saw the rest of it. It had an oblong abdomen, as long as she was tall. At the cephalothorax, where a regular spider would have had a head, this _ thing _ kept going. It looked like it had a waist--not an abdomen, a _ waist _ that developed into a chest. It had shoulders and arms and five-fingered hands. It had a neck and a head and a face that looked like a man.

It was grinning at her. 

She had been afraid before, when she hadn’t known the true nature of this beast. Now that she knew, now that she saw it… “afraid” didn’t even begin to describe the feeling.

Black eyes clustered around the creature’s face, two large main eyes and then multiple smaller ones. Intellectually, Belle knew there were six more eyes than she was used to looking at on one face, but right now she was far too overwhelmed to count them. It looked at her, the gleam of her torch reflecting in all of its shiny black eyes.

“Choice?” it repeated. The mouth looked human, but with stubby chelicerae protruding out from the sides like an old-time moustache. That was where the creature had its fangs. “Meal or mate?”

Shaking, Belle took a step closer to it. “Mate.”

Instantly, two legs came from behind her and scooped her up. As she was lifted up into the air, Belle couldn’t fight her body’s instinct to wiggle and squirm. But then, another leg pressed itself onto her chest.

“Stop,” the creature said. “You look yummy when you do that. Remember, you are _ mate _.”

Chest heaving, Belle tried to think. Of course her frantic motions would look like some small animal fighting for its life! She couldn’t act like that, or it might spur on a feeding instinct instead of a sexual one. She had to stay calm. She had to think like a spider.

“What does a mate do?”

The legs that held her lifted her up even higher, setting her in the center of the asymmetrical golden web. The creature let her go and Belle grabbed onto the silk threads, bracing herself for a fall.

But she didn’t fall. Belle looked at her arms and saw that they were sticking to the web, without her having to hold on to anything. About half of the threads were coated with droplets that looked like dew. She could reach one hand out to the droplets, and as soon as she touched them she found that she couldn’t move her hand away from the thread. She was stuck.

In a spirit of having nothing to lose, Belle reached her other hand out to a thread that had no sticky droplets. That one she could touch freely, she could run her hand back and forth over the impossibly thin golden thread. 

She plucked at the thread, like a harp string, and felt the vibrations emanate all around her. The creature was below her, balancing delicately on eight thin legs. It only walked on the threads that had no droplets, safe from the traps it had laid for others. When she touched the thread, it reacted, perking its head up to register the vibrations.

It was coming closer to her, approaching her from below. Black, lifeless eyes looked up at her. Eyes like that shouldn’t be so expressive. Belle shouldn’t have been able to discern curiosity and wonder in eyes that were nothing but eight round voids.

“You are mate,” it whispered. Its strange voice sounded almost awed. “Mate is queen.”

Climbing up the thread on all its legs, the creature came and looked Belle in the face. Even the human parts of him--_ it _ , Belle corrected her thoughts, even the parts of the spider that _ looked like _ a human--were colored for camouflage on the forest floor. The hands were green-brown and ended in sharp black points that _ looked like _ filed fingernails.

He--_ it _\--brushed away the strands of hair that had escaped from Belle’s ponytail. It touched her face and cocked its head to look at her. 

“Pretty mate,” it said.

“Thank you,” Belle said. Maybe that was stupid, but good manners never hurt. 

The creature’s skin was mottled into a tortise-shell mixture of green and brown and black, with flecks of iridescent gold shining through. And it _ was _ skin, Belle was pretty sure. This wasn’t an exoskeleton. How was it possible that this thing was both an arachnid _ and _ a vertebrate? 

He seemed as fascinated with her as she was with him. His hands slowly trailed down from her cheek to her neck. But it got confused when it reached her khaki jacket and the blouse underneath.

“Wrong,” it said. The thing had eight eyes, but only two eyebrows to furrow in confusion. 

“I’m wearing clothes,” Belle explained. “It’s… kind of like fur? That I can take off?”

That did not seem to help him understand. “Wrong,” he said again.

“You know how sheep have that wooly white stuff on the outside? Have you ever seen it come off?”

Realization dawned. All eight eyes widened in delight and his fanged mouth cracked into a smile. “Sheer!” it squeaked. “I can sheer human mate!”

“Gently!” Belle cried before he could get carried away. “_ Please _ be careful with me.”

It looked into her eyes and spoke softly in its inhuman voice: “Mate is small. Mate is weak. I will be gentle.” 

Belle swallowed. “Thank you.”

His five-fingered hands were clumsy, but Belle was impressed that he was even trying to undo her buttons. She’d had human dates who would just rip her blouse open when they’d started making out.

While his hands slowly exposed more of her skin, his pointed legs caressed her body. It was a strange and not entirely pleasant touch--like being softly stroked with a pool cue--but she appreciated the effort. He was being very gentle.

Once he had undone the buttons on her jacket, her blouse, and her khakis, the creature only had to push her sports bra up and her underwear down to get access to everything he wanted. 

It looked her up and down and Belle had never had so many eyes on her body at once.

“Mate,” it whispered. His voice was thick and heavy. “_ Perfect _ mate _ . _”

A shiver went up Belle’s spine. God help her, she had never felt so sexy. The mine was surprisingly warm and she felt herself opening up to this creature. She wanted to let him in to her body, and not just for the pursuit of scientific endeavors. Her nipples hardened and she twisted her body on the web, trying to get closer to him.

He saw what she was doing. With his long, thin legs holding him onto the web, the creature drew nearer to Belle. They were face to face, torso to torso. Her legs were spread, she waited for him to mount her or skewer her or rub up against her in an animalistic passion.

But he didn’t.

He touched her face again, gently, all eight of his eyes looking into hers. There was something about him, something about his eyes and his soft touch. He looked at her like he adored her. But how could a spider be capable of adoration? And how could Belle possibly be worthy of it?

With a strong but tender jerk, he pulled her stuck hand away from the web. Her arms were still stuck, they held her up in the middle of these golden threads. But now both her hands were free.

“Thank you,” Belle said.

The creature didn’t say anything. It lowered itself a little, so he was looking up at her again. He raised his chin, exposing his neck in front of Belle’s free hands. A few eyes looked at her expectantly.

“Do you want me to touch you?”

“Please?” it hissed. “Mate touch?” 

Belle’s heart fluttered. It sounded so _ sad _. How long had it been alone? There couldn’t be any females of this species. If there were, her creature would have mated already and there would have been spiderlings and in short order the entire continent of Australia (if not the entire world) would have been covered in golden webs and all life would be prey to this apex predator. 

She reached out her open palm to his cheek. With a sigh, he closed most of his eyes and leaned into her touch. His skin was warm and only slightly rough. She touched his cheek, his jaw, but when her fingers brushed against the flesh that sheathed his fangs, he jerked back.

“No!” he said in a fervent whisper. “Not there!”

Belle swallowed. “Does it hurt you?”

“Hurt _ you _ !” he said. He tilted his head in the dim light, showing off the venom dripping from his fangs. “Hurt sheep, hurt prey, hurt smelly male human. Not hurt you.” His two largest eyes bore into her. “ _ Never _hurt mate!”

Again, Belle felt her soul soften at this gentle monster. He was so intense, so insistent, so aware of his strength and her weakness.

“Do you know what names are?” She wanted to give him something, something more than just the physical release they had initially dealt for.

He cocked his head at her. “Name?”

She nodded. “It’s something you can call me, to separate me from other humans, so you don’t have to keep calling me ‘mate,’ unless you want to.”

“Mate _ is _ separate,” he said reverently. “Mate is nothing like other humans. Mate has name?”

“Mm-hmm,” she nodded. “My name is Belle.”

“Belle,” he said in his strange voice. The multiple tones gave her name a musical quality. It was clear that he had never said the word before, and Belle felt that she had never before heard anyone _ really _ say her name. 

She never wanted anyone else to say it again.

“Do you have a name?” she asked him. “Do others of your kind call you anything?”

With a series of strange clicks and grunts, he made a long poly-syllabic sound that started with an R and ended with “in.”

“I don’t think I can say that,” Belle said apologetically. “I’m not as good with my mouth as you are.”

“Belle,” he said again, dismissing her shortcomings in his adoration. “Belle, you are perfect.”

He put his hands on her again, on her neck and her chest. He ran his palms over her breasts and rubbed her nipples with his thumbs. 

Belle moaned and he stopped at once, his black eyes wide.

“No,” she explained. “No, that feels good. I like it when you touch me. I _ really _ like it when you touch me there.” 

Nodding slowly, he put his hands on her again. His pointed legs kept him suspended over her on the web. Gently, he trailed his fingers over the curve of her waist, his eyes looking down between her legs. 

“Taste,” he whispered. His largest eyes looked at her face, the rest of them looked down below her waist “Want to taste.”

“Okay,” Belle said without hesitation. “But what about your venom?”

He was already climbing down the web and he looked up at her as he answered. “Careful!” he said brightly. “Feels good!”

Whenever anybody went down on her, the only thing Belle didn’t like was how she had no idea what was going on. That wasn’t so bad if the person knew what they were doing--if all Belle was aware of was electric bliss then it didn’t matter what technique they were using. But when guys _ didn’t _ know what they were doing and all Belle felt was a mildly pleasant warmth, then she would have liked to know what they were trying and hope that they would listen to her suggestions. 

But the spider, the monster with a name she couldn’t pronounce, did _ not _ need her help. The shock of his first touch burst up her spine and made her shriek.

“I’m okay!” she cried before he could stop. “That was good!”

“Yes,” he said, lifting his head up from between her legs. “I know. I smell. Belle feels good.” 

_ Fuck _, Belle thought. How did he know what he was doing? How did this animal know how well he was mating her? Just by smell? Just by reading her body and sensing the animal in her? How much of an animal was she that she could accept him into her?

Probing and licking, his tongue explored her everywhere. Belle was so wet she couldn’t feel anything but pleasure, a steadily-mounting glow that rose higher out of her with every move he made. He pressed down against her heat, pushing his face into her, flicking his tongue over and over, everywhere around her cunt. 

“I’m going to orgasm,” she gasped, more as an explanation than anything else. He was working her up so perfectly, but would he know what would come of his efforts? “I’m going to shake and scream, but it’s good. It’s _ very _ good. You’re not hurting me. _ Fuck! _” 

The sticky web behind her held her down, kept her from writhing and jerking like she would have if she were free. God, if someone was doing this to her on her bed in her crappy apartment she’d be thrashing on the mattress and covering her mouth with her hand so she wouldn’t wake the neighbors.

But Belle didn’t have to worry about that here. They were in a cavern, kilometers away from any settlements. They only person who could hear her moans and wails was Gaston, and he was still knocked out cold.

She would have to get him to a hospital when this was all over. 

For now, Belle let loose her cries. She shouted and screamed and pressed herself as close as she could to the creature that was dedicating himself to her pleasure. 

He didn’t stop, didn’t seem aware that she had climaxed. He kept his mouth on her--did he even use it to breathe?--and plunged her into another wave of ecstasy. 

Belle whimpered and moaned as a second orgasm built up and then released. Her body hung limp against the sticky threads, but her legs were still open and the spider still had his mouth on her, relentless and hungry.

After her third orgasm in a row, Belle weakly tried to close her legs. She couldn’t even feel her pussy anymore. “Please stop,” she gasped. “Just let me catch my breath.”

The creature pulled away from her with a squelching sound. Ribbons of fluids hung and dripped between their connected bodies. When he looked at her, somehow his eyes seemed even wider and darker than they had been before.

“Belle is pleased?” He rested his hands on her waist.

“Oh God, yes,” she answered. “You were--that was amazing!”

“Belle is happy?”

She looked down at him. Her hands were free enough that she could reach down and touch his face the way he liked so much. His cheeks were moist and sticky and Belle felt her body clench.

“I’m happy,” she said. Why did it matter so much to him? “You made me happy.”

Under her hands, she felt him swallow. “Now,” he gulped. “May I mate with you?”

Belle let out a chuckle and leaned her head against the threads. “Of course! You know, in human mating what you did isn’t even necessary. It’s just polite. _ Extremely _ polite to do it three times.” 

He didn’t answer. He crawled up the web to face her, to press his body against hers. One hand touched her face, stroked her cheek with the backs of his fingers. His other hand stayed in the space between their bodies. Belle looked down to see what he was doing, but he tilted her chin up to hold her gaze. 

“Don’t be scared,” he whispered.

“I’m not,” Belle answered. “I’m curious.”

His wide mouth broke into a smile. Now his fangs dripped with more fluids than just venom. The smell of her completion on his face only made her wetter.

She felt his hand against her, felt some strange new wetness sliding against her pleasure. Slowly, the creature pushed his fingers into her cunt.

The fingers didn’t move. He wasn’t, well, _ fingering _ her. She couldn’t quite tell what he was doing. She had never been fisted--was that what this was? He was so _ slow _ as he entered her. His hand felt so much bigger than any cock she’d ever taken, bigger than even her most adventurous sex toys. Thank God he’d already given her three orgasms!

Belle panted as he pushed himself deeper into her. Her hips rocked with a needful motion. Was he going to thrust? Was he going to fuck her properly or just fill her with his hand?

When she looked at the creature, he had half of his eyes closed in bliss. The other half gazed down at her. “Belle is good?”

“Can you move your arm?” Belle gasped as her body undulated back and forth. “Can you match the way I’m moving?”

It took a moment, but he figured out what she wanted. They rocked together, as tightly joined as any two lovers in the history of the world. Belle’s body shook the entire web and the creature pushed himself against her for stability. She cried and moaned with deep, guttural noises and she had to hastily tell him that this was good, he was good, she was feeling _ so good _.

The orgasm rose out of her belly, deeper and stronger than the three she’d had from his mouth. _ Vaginal orgasm _ , Belle thought, categorising the experience even as she lived it. Biologically, she knew, there was no difference between a vaginal orgasm and a clitoral one--but this sure as hell _ felt _ different.

She came apart with a mad rush, every inch of her jerking and thrusting against the creature’s hand. Her body clenched around it with so much force she almost thought she heard a crack. Had she broken his wrist in her passion? It wouldn’t have surprised her. Fuck, but she had never been fucked this well!

The creature moved with her, thrust for thrust and jerk for jerk. He clung to her with one hand and fucked her with the other. He made strange, chittering, animal noises and Belle knew that he was voicing his pleasure. He grunted out his desire, his passion, his burning need that only Belle could satisfy. Pushing into her again and again, the creature trembled and shook on its web, all eyes closed in ecstasy. 

When she couldn’t come anymore, she lay back on the web loosely. The creature delicately pried her away from the sticky golden threads and wrapped her in his arms. Belle sighed and rested in his embrace. Had she ever before felt so exhausted? So sated? So _ full _?

For a while, she dozed in the creature’s arms. He seemed to have no interest in letting her go and she wasn’t exactly ready to walk back to the Jeep. The two of them spoke together, pillow talk without pillows, exchanging questions and compliments, both of them coming down from a wonderful high.

All too soon, another noise entered their conversation--a harsh groan of pain from the cave floor.

“Gaston!” Belle all but leaped away from the creature. How could she have forgotten about Gaston? The venom must be wearing off. He was waking up. He probably still had head trauma. She needed to get him back to the Nolan’s!

Grabbing onto the smooth threads--not the ones covered in a sticky dew that trapped prey--Belle slid down the web and jumped the remaining distance to the ground.

“Could have carried you,” the creature said, still in the center of the web. 

Belle smiled up at him and began to put her clothes to rights. “I’m sorry I have to leave,” she said. “But he really should go to a hospital.”

The creature looked down at Gaston, who was making a valiant effort to roll over in his golden cocoon. “Deal’s a deal,” he shrugged, his arms pulled tightly across his chest. “You may go.” 

“I, uh, I had a good time,” Belle said lamely. 

But the spider was already retreating into the darkness.

She wanted to shout after it, but what could she say? Stay, wait, let’s have dinner? It was ridiculous. She couldn’t pursue a romantic relationship with a spider! Why would she even want to? And she couldn’t even come back to this godforsaken cave for another round of the best sex she’d ever had in her life!

If the only reason it had been attacking sheep was out of misplaced sexual energy, then when Belle had relived that energy, she had negated any possibility of it happening again. The Nolans would be happy, but she would never have a reason to come back here.

_ And _ \--Belle just now realized--all of her scientific justifications for this little experiment came up to nothing because her results could not be replicated and no one in the scientific community would _ ever _ believe her! 

“Fuck!” Belle shouted as she kicked a rock with her hiking boot. What a stupid waste of time! The only thing she gotten from walking into this stupid cave was the ability to walk back out again with stupid Gaston! 

Belle sighed. Right. Gaston. Hospital.

She took out her pocket knife and cut the golden silk away from his body. After she helped him sit up, she rubbed some feeling back into his hands. The bitemarks in his shoulder were the size of American quarters. His skin was cold, maybe numb. Would he be able to walk?

“How you feeling, buddy?”

Her expedition partner rubbed his head. “The hell happened?”

“We found the sheep killer, don’t you remember? It was a giant spider.”

“How big, like a foot?”

Belle laughed. “Close enough. It bit you, and then I picked up the rifle and shot it. The pieces are too small to put into specimen bags, but at least we know it won’t be a problem anymore.”

Gaston nodded, still too zoned out to point out any holes in that story. “Told you,” he slurred a little as he spoke. “Told you it was a good idea to bring a real gun.”

“Yep,” Belle said as she helped him stand. Step by step, she helped him out of the cave. “You really saved the day.”

****

On the walk back to the Jeep and the drive back to camp, Belle was able to refine her story. The caves held nothing new, no groundbreaking discoveries in biology. Just a larger-than-average golden orb weaver that had been biting local sheep and injecting them with venom. Belle told the Nolans that the thing probably hadn’t even known what to do with prey that large. But the most important part was that it wouldn’t bother anyone again. 

She tried to apply that mentality to her own experiences in the cave. It had happened, but it wasn’t that big a deal. It wasn’t going to change her life. As soon as she got back to the station, she had taken the longest, hottest shower of her life. Warm water ran over her and she tried her best to wash away the memory of the creature. 

A few days later she was back in the states, lecturing to dead-eyed teenagers and expanding her knowledge in the library instead of on the field. She tried to focus on her research, tried not to think of it as a cop-out that she was back inside, reading about other people’s adventures instead of having one of her own. 

Belle found herself getting restless and moody, snapping at her undergrads and crying at commercials on TV. It was mid-October and everywhere she went there were Halloween decorations. Every cartoon spider and every fake web stuck out to Belle, leaving her in a curious emotional state, a mixture of depression and horniness.

“Honestly, Ruby, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Belle said one night when she’d been so distraught she’d actually picked up the phone to call her best friend. “I’ve never felt this weird before in my _ life _.”

“Are you sure it’s not just PMS?” Ruby said over the sound of club music. “When are you gonna start your period?”

“Oh my God, Rubes! That’s it!” Belle fumbled in her purse for her day planner. “I’m supposed to have my period…” She didn’t finish the sentence. 

Her last period had been in August. She was more than a month late. 

“Oh my God, Rubes,” Belle said, in an entirely different tone than the last time she had said it. “I have to go back to Australia.”

“The fuck for?” Ruby shouted into the phone. 

Belle found herself staring at a blank space in the middle distance. She hardly believed herself as she said the words:

“I think I’m pregnant.” 

  


  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note for posterity: Originally, this was supposed to be a one-shot, but I ended it on a cliffhanger and enough people thought I needed to follow through on the premise I created that I had to keep it going. As of summer 2020, I have no idea where it will end up.


	2. Unexpected

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Belle figures things out.

In a perfect world, Belle French would have never known that you can buy pregnancy tests at the dollar store.

Wandering through the aisles of the Dahllah Hahbah, Belle imagined what that perfect world would be like. In a perfect world, she wouldn’t be alone for this trip--unless she had a plan to surprise the co-parent of her child, but even then she would probably have brought Ruby along with her. In a perfect world, she and her significant other would have gotten the most precise pregnancy test available. It probably would have been expensive, the sort of thing you need a prescription to get. In a perfect world, this would have been an expected baby, a  _ wanted _ baby. In a perfect world, Belle would have already been trying to conceive, with the help of a committed partner. She would have been charting her cycle and taking her basal temperature and regularly injecting her uterus with human sperm.

In a perfect world, she wouldn’t have to specify  _ human _ . 

Without really thinking about what she was doing, Belle piled junk into the green plastic shopping cart. Halloween candy was half off, and the tiny packs of beef jerky were only a dollar. She had been especially hungry for meat lately. In the clearance section, orange and black spider decorations stared at her. Their googly eyes were equal parts friendly and ominous.

She backed away from the Halloween stuff, back into the comparative comfort of a Christmas display. She grabbed a box of candy canes and made her way to the check out lane. 

The middle-aged cashier in a green polo shirt wore the dead-eyed glaze of someone who isn’t getting paid enough to express emotions on the clock. She didn’t talk to Belle as she scanned her purchases over the blinking red light. If she noticed the pregnancy test amidst all the junk food and paper products, she didn’t mention it. 

And that was fine by Belle. She didn’t want people to mention it. She didn’t want it to be real. That was part of why she had gone to the next town over to make this surreptitious purchase. She didn’t want to run the risk of anyone recognizing her. Even if no one saw the test, even if they were supportive and encouraging, Belle didn’t want to think about what was happening  _ at all _ . If not thinking about something could keep it from being real, then Belle would have no troubles in the world. 

There was a used book store in this town, with a wider variety of subjects than the university store’s collection of last semester’s textbooks. Belle parked her car on the street and walked in. Maybe the smell of books would help her calm down.

It was the best kind of used book store, with towering shelves and hidden nooks and endless rooms leading into each other. There was even a cat wandering around, pestering patrons to pet her. Belle breathed deeply, content even in the sections that had no appeal to her. She brushed past cookbooks and theology, lingered briefly over a shelf of “Personal Relationship/Self-Help,” and eventually found herself in the most daunting section of all. 

There were several copies of The Book. The book she didn’t want to admit she was looking for. After all The Book was the sort of thing the average woman only needed for nine months out of her life. Belle would probably donate her copy once all this was over with. However it would be over. However it  _ could _ be over. There was so much that she didn’t know. It would be good, at least, to have a baseline of information, to know what was normal for a human woman carrying a human child. 

She held The Book in one arm, making a conscious effort not to cradle it. As at the Dahllah Hahbah, she tried to camouflage The Book by surrounding it with decoys. She picked up a romance paperback, a history of lobster fishing, and a handbook for learning American Sign Language. After a moment of hesitation, Belle also pulled out a hardcover copy of  _ Arachnology Through the Ages _ . When the stack of books was heavier than she could hold, Belle decided she was safe to check out. 

Unlike the Dahllah Hahbah, this bookstore was staffed solely by the woman who owned the place--a retiree with her long hair in a loose bun and reading glasses on a chain around her neck. Midmorning on a Wednesday, she was obviously thrilled to chat up each and every customer who walked through the door.

“Looks like you got a good haul!” the woman said brightly.

Belle made herself smile and put the books on the counter. “It’s mostly gifts for people.”

“Early Christmas, that’s a smart move!” The owner began to ring up the books. “Oh,  _ Texas Destiny _ is  _ such _ a good read! Wait til you get to the part with the wild horses. Do you like horses?”

Her smile was still fixed in place. “A… little.” Belle didn’t give a shit about horses, but this was not the time to talk about it. Maybe if the shopkeeper was distracted by  _ Texas Destiny _ , she wouldn’t notice--

“Oh!” The woman’s voice rose to a pitch that could only mean the worst thing in the world for Belle: She had seen The Book. 

Belle could only be grateful that there was no one else in the store when the woman held up the copy of  _ What to Expect When You’re Expecting _ . 

The shopkeeper looked Belle up and down, her smile even wider than before. “So can I say congratulations?” 

Belle bit her lip and looked down. “Maybe? I--I don’t really know yet.”

“Oh sweetie!” the woman said. “If you’re buying this book, then you  _ know _ . And even if it’s not this time, it’ll be soon, I can tell. You look  _ very  _ fertile.”

Mortified, cheeks blazing red, Belle couldn’t say anything.

The woman just kept talking. “This is the gold standard for moms-to-be. And they say it’s easy to read, doesn’t make anything too science-y.”

At that, Belle found her voice. “I’m actually working on my PhD at the University of Maine. I’ve already completed my masters in Zoology. Science-y stuff doesn’t bother me.”

The shopkeeper took that in stride. “And your... husband? Boyfriend? Partner? What do they do?”

_ Lives in a cave and spins gold webs _ , Belle thought but couldn’t say. Instead she pulled out her wallet. “It’s kind of complicated. Where do I swipe my card?”

“Oh, we’re cash only, sweetie.”

“Sure,” Belle barely kept the annoyance out of her voice as she put away her debit card and pulled out the twenty she saved for emergencies. “Of course you are.” 

  
  


****

When she got back to her crappy apartment, Belle thoroughly read and re-read the instructions on the pregnancy test. She wanted to believe that this was a complicated, mysterious process. Maybe she had been wrong the whole time. Maybe she had misread the signs and miscalculated the dates since her last period. Maybe she would go to the bathroom and find her underwear stained with blood, wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t that be so much better than the alternative?

Overthinking was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the longer Belle dithered and avoided the inevitable, the more worked-up she found herself getting. She would have less anxiety as soon as she had some idea of what was happening. 

On the other hand, every second she  _ didn’t know _ if she was pregnant was another second when she could pretend she definitely  _ wasn’t _ pregnant. It could be true. She could be just imagining things. But she wouldn’t know until she peed on the goddamned stick.

Before she began, she set the kettle on for a cup of tea. By the time the water boiled, it was done. Belle held her mug of Earl Grey close to her chest and looked down at the little blue plus sign. 

It had happened.

She was pregnant.

_ From a motherfucking spider!  _

****

“I’m coming over and I’m bringing margarita mix!” 

Ruby’s voice was loud, even considering the amplification of being on speakerphone. She had to shout to be heard over the noise of the road and the static of her phone and the pounding of Belle’s blood in her ears. 

Belle had managed to keep her composure for five entire minutes before the reality of her situation had come crashing down over her head and left her a sobbing mess. In her distress, she’d called her best friend, and Ruby had answered with her usual love language: girl time and booze.

“But I can’t drink!” Belle wailed. “I’m fucking pregnant and tequila will fucking kill my  _ baby _ !”

“Don’t worry, I’ll drink your tequila, and you can just have the lime juice. Vitamin C is good for zygotes, right?”

“I don’t know.” Trying to pull herself together, Belle wiped her eyes with the heel of her hands. There were all kinds of vitamins she needed to be taking now--or at least, there would be if she was having a  _ human _ baby. What would a spider baby need? What kind of  _ thing _ had taken up residence in her body? “I don’t know  _ anything _ !” 

“Okay, okay,” Ruby tried to soothe her. “Don’t panic. Everything will be worse if you panic. I am  _ so close _ to your apartment, Belle. Just hang on until I get there. How about you look at the table of contents for your new book?”

Normally, there was nothing that calmed Belle down more than reading the table of contents to a book. There was something so comforting about knowing the progression of a text, to have all the steps and developments laid out in a simple outline, to get little teases as to the meat of the book. It was like reading the menu before sitting down to a feast, anticipating all the good things to come. 

But if Belle looked at the table of contents to  _ What to Expect When You’re Expecting _ , she would be peeking into the progression of the next nine months of her life, and that was not a timetable she could think about right now. 

“I’ll be okay,” she told Ruby through wobbling lips. “Are you bringing food, too?”

“What, you think I’m an amature? I’m gonna hang up now so you don’t hear me freak out about parallel parking, but I’ll be up soon, hun. Okay?”

“Okay.” Belle nodded, even though Ruby couldn’t see it. She hung up the phone and took a deep breath.

Ruby’s breezy confidence was exactly what Belle needed right now. It made her feel normal, even in the middle of the most un-normal thing she’d ever heard of. Ruby had been an RA while they were undergrads, a faithful post-breakup bar companion, and the recipient of teary late-night calls from friends going back to her high school days. She knew everything about how to deal with someone who was scared and alone and crying her eyes out. Belle wasn’t the first person to call Ruby up in tears, and she wouldn’t be the last. 

It helped to think that her problems were not unique. Every day, women all around the world discovered that they had an unplanned pregnancy. For every one of them, it was the end of one world and the beginning of another. And Belle was just the same. The  _ unorthodox _ manner of conception didn’t change the fact that Belle was merely one of thousands or millions of women who had been put in this exact same situation since the dawn of time. And, like so many of her countless sisters, Belle found solace in reaching out to other women, to find help and comfort and solidarity. 

Laden with grocery bags, Ruby burst through the unlocked door like an inverse Santa Claus. Instead of a fat old man bearing gifts for the nice, Ruby was a skinny young woman offering solace to someone who had been decidedly naughty. Belle was more happy to see her friend than she had been on any Christmas morning of her life. 

“Hey,” she tried, with a watery smile.

“Baby!” Ruby dropped the bags on the ground and pulled Belle in for a hug. “Or--no. That was a bad choice of words, wasn’t it? How do you feel? Am I allowed to say the B-word?”

Belle laughed and cried at the same time. “It’s fine,” she shook her head. “Don’t worry about saying the word ‘baby.’ That’s what it is, kinda.”

Ruby let Belle go and started unpacking her bags. “I know,” she said. “But ‘baby’ is an emotionally charged word. We can say ‘embryo,’ if that makes things easier on you. We’re almost doctors, Belle. We can be scientific about this.”

_ Scientifically, the word we should use is ‘larva,’  _ Belle thought but didn’t say. Ruby was her best friend and the most supportive person in the world right now. But even she would balk if she knew what Belle had really been up to on her trip to Australia. 

Together, they cleared the clutter and books off the coffee table. Then Ruby made Belle sit on the couch and watch while she spread out her feast.

“Okay, so the tequila is just for me, but I did bring Sprite--it’s caffeine free and it’ll work with the margarita mix. Additionally, chips and gauc, cheese puffs, cheesecake bites, chocolate chip cookies--”

“Did you sort your shopping list alphabetically?” 

“ _ And _ \--” Ruby went on, “a whole goddamned rotisserie chicken. I figured we could just rip into it with our hands like old-timey kings, like we’re going to throw the bones on the floor for the dogs.”

Belle let out an incredulous giggle. “That’s ridiculous! And perfect. Thank you so much, Ruby.”

“Oh! I also got this fancy salt for our margaritas. It’s made with black ants! Can you  _ believe _ that?”

“Ants?” Belle whispered as her hand drifted over her stomach. Suddenly nauseous, she leapt off the couch and ran to the bathroom.

When she finished throwing up, Belle stayed on the ground next to the toilet. Ruby had lingered in the doorway but didn’t come in until Belle was done. She offered her a glass of water and Belle took it gratefully. Ruby sat on the edge of the bathtub, her face full of concern.

“Has the morning sickness been bad?”

“I don’t know if this is bad, I’ve never had it before!” Belle took a sip of water and closed her eyes. “Isn’t it supposed to be bad? Isn’t pregnancy supposed to be divine punishment for promiscuity?”

“If it’s punishment for anything, it’s for poor planning. I thought you were on the pill?”

Belle shook her head. “I kept it up for a few months after Will and Ana got back together for the fifth time, but when it looked like they were sticking I didn’t bother to refill my prescription. I don’t have sex with men often enough to justify taking a pill every day.”

“Except for when you do.”

“Yeah,” Belle took another drink. “Except for when I do.”

Ruby took a breath and rubbed her hands over her knees. “Listen, you know I’m here for you no matter what, right?”

Belle was still shaky, but she rested in that certainty. “Right.”

“And I’m not going to pressure you or make you do anything. You don’t even have to make any decisions today, okay?”

“Okay.”

“But I gotta ask: Belle, what do you want to do? Have you thought about your options? Do you  _ want _ to keep it? Do you want to… not keep it?” 

Leaning her head back against the cool tile of her bathroom wall, Belle opened her eyes slowly. It had been such an ordeal to even confirm that she was pregnant, the thought of what came next had been too much to consider until now.

She took a deep breath, eight counts in, eight counts out. 

“I think ‘abortion’ is an even more emotionally charged word than ‘baby.’”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Ruby said. “It doesn’t have to be a big deal. I can drive you to Planned Parenthood, I’ll be with you every step of the way. If that’s what you want.”

“I know,” Belle said softly. Ruby’s support was unconditional. She would paint a nursery or hold Belle through a difficult procedure, both with equal willingness and sincerity. 

But Belle had an instinctive terror at the thought of going to a doctor’s office in her condition. What would a real urine test reveal about the nature of her child? What kind of image would show up on an ultrasound? Even if she wanted to get rid of this thing, would a regular abortion procedure work? Or would they have to go into her uterus with insecticide? 

“I don’t want to go to a doctor,” she said softly.

Ruby’s eyes widened. “But you  _ have _ to go to an OB! Or even just talk to Victor. I mean, if you’re going to stay pregnant, you  _ have _ to stay healthy and safe.”

“I know,” Belle closed her eyes again. What could she say? How could she explain any of this? “But… I… I don’t know what will happen.”

“What, like with insurance or something?”

Belle’s eyes shot open. That worked. “Yeah,” she lied. “I don’t want to deal with crazy medical bills.”

Ruby nodded thoughtfully. “Does Australia have universal health care?”

Now it was Belle’s turn to nod, slowly, saying words only slightly after the thoughts came into her head. “We… do. I should go back home… because of the healthcare.” 

“Yeah, no, you definitely should. Besides, your parents are there!”

At the mention of her parents, Belle’s tenuous hope crumpled. “Oh God!” she let out a wrenching cry. “My parents are gonna kill me!”

“Nooo,” Ruby crooned. She slid off the bathtub edge and joined Belle on the floor, pulling her into her arms and slowly rocking her back and forth. “I know it’s scary, but parents  _ can be _ okay with things. My mom didn’t want to tell Granny about me until I was almost born, but it all turned out fine!” She gave Belle a chaste kiss on the temple. “Even if your mom and dad freak out at first, they’ll come around soon. Babies are cute. They’re easy to like.”

Belle shook her head and let the tears fall silently. “Not this baby.”

“Don’t say that.” Ruby held Belle by the shoulders, twisting their bodies so they could look into each other’s eyes. “If you’re gonna keep this baby, Belle, you’ve got to own it. It will be a lovable baby because it will be  _ your _ baby. You’ve got to fight for it! If you’re this thing’s mom, you have to be its biggest fan. Does that make sense?”

Still teary, Belle nodded. “It’s my baby, right or wrong.”

“Unless you want to go to Planned Parenthood. That is entirely up to you. But once you make that choice--” Ruby balled her hand into a fist and shook it in a display of fierce determination “--then it’s  _ yours _ .”

“Mine,” Belle whispered. Her hand drifted down to her stomach. It was still flat and lifeless. There was nothing about her body that spoke of the life that grew inside her. Nothing that could tell her what manner of creature her child would become. But Ruby was right, it  _ was _ hers. And not just hers. “I should tell the father too.”

“Yeah, you never mentioned what happened! Who was this guy? What was he like? How was the sex?”

“The sex was  _ amazing _ ,” Belle admitted with the candor of the overly distraught. “But it was just sort of a one-night stand. I didn’t think I’d ever see him again.”

“Do you want to see him again? Do you think he’ll want to be involved?”

“He’ll  _ have _ to be involved,” Belle said with a dawning sense of relief.

Of  _ course _ the creature in the cave would be a part of their offspring’s life. If she was going to give birth to a spider, then it would have to be raised by a spider! And that thing… that thing was intelligent. It could care for its young. Maybe it could even take care of Belle.

She just had to see him again. 

Belle felt like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders. As she stood up, she nearly floated off the bathroom floor. She offered her hand down to Ruby and helped her get up. 

“Tomorrow morning, I have to call Dean Mills to see if someone can teach my classes for the rest of the semester.”

Ruby cocked her head at Belle. “And why is that?”

“Because I’m going back to Queensland.” 


	3. Birthmom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Belle finally makes it to Australia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everything I know about Australia I learned from Wikipedia. If anyone wants to "Aussie-pick" for me, send me a ask on my Tumblr. That being said, I did find out that "spider" is the Australian word for what Americans call an ice cream float. And I wasn't about to let that opportunity slip by!
> 
> On a more serious note, I don't know if anyone else needs a trigger warning for "adoption," but things get a little emotional in this chapter. (I know that's what everyone wants out of their spider-porn.)

Belle French had lived in Maine for too long. Even though she was a native Aussie, her time in college and grad school had gotten her used to thinking of November as cold and rainy, even snowy. Autumn in the northern United States was a time for sweaters and boots and pumpkin-spiced hot drinks.

But here, at David and Mary Margaret Nolan’s sheep station in western Queensland, November meant that anyone who had the option stayed inside with the air conditioning on full blast, even at night. It had been sweltering when Belle had arrived earlier in the day, and even after dinner it was only just starting to cool down. In the clean, spacious kitchen, Mary Margaret Nolan was scooping ice cream into tall glasses and pouring in clear, fizzy lemonade. 

It was hard not to think of her as ‘Mrs. Nolan.’ Mary Margaret wasn’t  _ old _ , but she was older than Belle. She practically vibrated with a cheerfulness that reminded Belle of a kindergarten teacher, and consequently made Belle feel like she was about five years old. Being given ice cream only made the feeling worse.

“I hope you don’t mind lime spiders,” Mary Margaret said. “I’d offer you something more adult, but we got rid of all the liquor when--” she spread her arms to show off her bulging belly. In Australia, being six months pregnant was pretty much the only excuse you had for not drinking.

Belle wrapped her arms around her own, smaller, bump. She was still at the stage where wearing loose clothes just made her look fat, not pregnant, and that was fine by her. The longer she could go without advertising her condition the better she would feel.

Had Mary Margaret been showing when she had been here in August? Had Belle just not noticed because pregnancy had been the furthest thing from her mind? If she had picked up on Mary Margaret’s condition, would that have given her a subconscious warning to be careful about who or what she allowed into her vagina?

She swallowed down her questions and her regrets. She wanted to be polite to her hosts. “Ice cream is fine,” she said. “Spiders were always my favorite when I was a kid.”

Taking her glass, Belle looked down into the clear soda and watched the vanilla ice cream react with the carbonation. Slowly, thin cracks appeared in the ice cream, branching out until the whole thing did indeed look like a spider. In a sudden burst of emotion, Belle grabbed a spoon and furiously mixed the two ingredients together until they were a blended mess. Spiders of all kinds were the last thing she wanted to think about right now. She gulped down her glass and didn’t stop until it was half-empty.

Mary Margaret sat down on one of the bar stools surrounding her kitchen island and took a dainty bite her of ice cream. “I am  _ so _ glad you were able to come back, Belle. I was really worried when we started losing sheep again.”

“I was worried too,” Belle said. That was not a lie. She had been  _ very _ worried about what kind of plausible reason she could make up in order to justify another trip from Storybrooke to Queensland. 

But when she had called the Nolans, they said that they were just about to call  _ her _ . It seemed their sheep were being attacked again, and since she had fixed it last time, would she be willing to help them again? For the same rate? 

And that had solved two of Belle’s problems at once.

“What did you say was the name of the thing that you killed before?”

“A golden silk orb-weaver,” Belle answered, not revealing that reports of the spider’s death had been greatly exaggerated. “The genus is called  _ Nephila _ . They can grow to be exceptionally large.”

The largest species on record was  _ Nephila Komaci _ . It was recently discovered in Madagascar and the females were roughly the size of any human hand that would try to squish them. That was very big for a spider, but the creature that had  _ really _ been killing the Nolan’s sheep was about three meters long from face to spinnerets, with a leg span that even Belle didn’t want to contemplate.

And that  _ thing _ was the father of her child.

“Do you think there is going to be more of it?”

Belle looked down at her stomach. “I--uh. Maybe. It is an animal, after all. There’s a biological imperative to--” Belle gulped, “--continue the species.” 

Mary Margaret put her hand on top of Belle’s on the stone countertop. “God, you look so pale. That flight must have really worn you out.”

“Something like that, yeah,” Belle admitted.

Airports and customs and security and car rentals were exhausting even on a good trip. But now she had several metric tons of mental anguish weighing on her. The thought of going through the full-body X-ray in the TSA line had almost given her a panic attack. Sure, a human fetus might not show up in a security scan, but what about a fetus with an exoskeleton? In the end, Belle had asked for a pat down instead, just to avoid the whole issue.

More than psychologically, Belle was physically run down. Pregnancy made her tired and hungry and nauseated  _ all the time _ . She was never comfortable anymore, no matter what she was doing. 

“Let’s take these to the living room,” Mary Margaret suggested, picking up her lime spider. “That way it’ll be more comfortable if either of us falls asleep in the middle of talking.”

Trailing behind, Belle watched Mary Margaret walk to the living room. At six months, she wasn’t quite waddling yet, not like pregnant women did in movies to show off that they were about to pop. But there was still a heaviness about her footsteps, a slightly-awkward sway that made her condition obvious, even from behind. 

Was Belle going to start moving like that in a few months? Her free hand twisted in her loose T-shirt. She couldn’t hide forever. Soon, people would know the second they looked at her that she was going to have a baby.

Would anyone be able to guess what  _ kind _ of baby she was going to have? 

“Come on in!” Mary Margaret said once they got into the living room.“Put your feet up.” She nodded to an easy chair and an ottoman, while she followed her own advice and stretched out longways on the floral-patterned sofa.

Belle sank down into the easy chair and-- _ God _ , it did feel good to relax! “Is this David’s chair?”

“Yeah. Sorry he had to go to bed so early. Farmer’s hours, you know.”

Closing her eyes for a moment, Belle nodded. “Usually when I come home, jet lag keeps me up all night, but I am just  _ so _ tired.”

Mary Margaret made a sympathetic noise. “I was the same way during my first trimester.”

Belle jerked up so quickly she almost spilled her spider. “I--What?” She thought about denying it, but Mary Margaret’s expression was completely calm and non-judgemental. She looked happy for Belle. “How did you know?”

“You wore tighter tops on your last visit. I wasn’t the only one who noticed.” She raised her eyebrows, but if there was a deeper meaning to that last sentence, it went right over Belle’s head. 

Belle was too busy putting her feet on the ground and her head between her knees. “I--I didn’t know people could see it.” She turned to Mary Margaret, her eyes wide and more than a little teary. “Please don’t tell anyone.”

“Oh, honey!” After a bit of hefting, Mary Margaret got off the couch and plodded over to sit on the ottoman in front of Belle’s chair. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. I didn’t know it was a secret.”

“Well, obviously it’s  _ not _ , if you can tell just by  _ looking _ at me.” Belle spat out the words, feeling her anger so she wouldn’t cry. It was so hard not to break down, not to show every bit of hurt and fear that swirled around her hormone-addled brain. 

Mary Margaret just put her hand on Belle’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” she said gently. “I know how scary this is. I really do.”

_ How would you know? _ Belle wanted to snap. And how  _ would _ she know? Mary Margaret Nolan was in her late thirties, with a mansion and a sheep station and a human husband. How the hell would she know what Belle was feeling? Right now, Belle had nothing. She had never felt so young, or so weak, or so alone. 

Now Mary Margaret was rubbing small circles into Belle’s back. “It’s okay,” she kept saying over and over. “It’s going to be okay.”

After a deep breath, Belle wiped her eyes and looked at the other woman. “How can you be so sure?”

With one hand still on Belle, Mary Margaret put her other hand on top of her own belly. “Little Neal here isn’t my first baby,” she said softly.

Belle gaped. “What?” She didn’t know the Nolans well, but they had never mentioned having children. In the photographs around the house, the only pictures of kids were class groups on field trips to the station.

Mary Margaret just smiled. “I think I was younger than you are now. I found out the spring of our freshman year of college--David’s and mine.” A dreamy look floated over her face as she remembered. “Yeah, I was only nineteen. And we were going to get married, but we hadn’t yet because we didn’t have any money. We were living in the States then. David had a scholarship, but he was working two jobs just to pay for textbooks and ramen.”

Belle blinked back her tears. Befuddlement had taken over sadness’ spot in her brain. The Nolans owned a thousand acres of farmland. They had hundreds of sheep and paid good wages to seven shepherds to take care of them. It was impossible to imagine them poor and desperate, microwaving instant noodles in a ratty dorm.

“What about you?” Belle asked. “What were you studying?”

“That’s the funny part, I was studying early childhood development. I wanted to be a teacher. I loved kids, I always have. But I knew how much  _ work _ it takes to raise them right. And I was studying and reading reports about how even the first few months are crucial for learning and factors that will set a child up for success or failure in later life. And I could see how the education system, especially in America, is just stacked against poor kids from the very beginning.” 

She shook her head. “We lived in this terrible studio apartment. The kitchen sink and the bathroom sink were the same thing. And David was talking about selling his  _ plasma _ to buy a crib!” 

Now it seemed to be Mary Margaret’s turn to cry. She kept shaking her head and rubbing her belly. “I wanted more for my baby. I had to give her better than that. I wanted to give her her best chance.”

Belle leaned forward, closer to Mary Margaret. She had never much liked her crappy apartment, but at least she had a bathroom.

“Wasn’t anyone able to help you? Your parents or…?”

Mary Margaret just shook her head. “David’s mom was sick and just as poor as we were. My parents both died before I turned eighteen. My dad left me a trust fund, but my step-mother had control of it until I turned twenty-five. She was very clear about keeping me away from my inheritance for as long as she legally could.”

There was clearly a story there, but Belle wanted to focus on the pregnancy. “So what did you do? About the baby?”

“I was pretty far along when I realized that we couldn’t keep her.” Tears flowed freely down Mary Margaret’s round face. “We had been to the ultrasound. We knew she was a girl. We knew we wanted to name her Emma. I had even started making her a blanket. During my eight-A.M. lectures, I would knit to keep myself awake.” She smiled through her tears. “I didn’t want to get an abortion. I wanted my baby to live, and have a good life. I just… I just knew she wasn’t going to get that if she was stuck with us.”

Belle let out a stream of air at that. On the one hand, she understood what young Mary Margaret had gone through. She understood wanting to give your child the best chance you could. And she understood the practical, financial limitations of being a  _ teenager in college _ and trying to also be a mother. Even with a devoted partner like David Nolan, that would have been an uphill battle.

But it still hurt to hear another person say that their own child would be better off without them. The love Mary Margaret had had for this baby was palpable, every bit as palpable as the desperation of their future prospects. Belle’s heart ached to think of this young girl, all full of hope and dreams, who  _ wanted  _ to be a mother--but not yet. Not so soon.

“I can’t imagine making that kind of decision,” Belle said. 

“It was hard, yeah.” Mary Margaret looked around the room, she seemed to be searching for something. Belle followed her gaze until it stopped on a box of tissues on the mantle.

“I’ll get them,” she said as she got out of the easy chair. “I think we both need them tonight.”

“Hormones and trauma are a great combination!” Mary Margaret laughed. When Belle offered her the box she took two tissues--one for her eyes and one for her nose. “I cried so much the first time I was pregnant. I think it was every day. And David helped, he tried his best. But even with him by my side, I still felt like it was the three of us against the world.”

Belle put her hand on her belly. “Yeah, that’s how I’ve been feeling. Except I don’t have a David. At least… not yet.” 

She didn’t know what the creature in the cave could do for her, or if it would even want to help. All she knew was that she had to try. She had traveled halfway around the world just for the chance to see him again and let him know about the baby, his baby. Their baby.

Mary Margaret put her hand over Belle’s. “I can give you Clay’s cell phone number, but I think he said something about going to Nepal.”

Blinking, Belle looked up. “Who?”

Mary Margaret looked as confused by Belle’s question as Belle was by her statement. “Clay?” she said. “Clay Gaston? From last time you were here. Isn’t he the… Isn’t he why you came back here?”

“Oh!” Belle tried to cover her surprise. She had pretty much forgotten about Gaston, the big game hunter who the Nolans had hired along with her to take care of their pest problem. Mary Margaret seemed to think that they had slept together.

That possibility was the only thing she could think of that was worse than reality. 

“No!” Belle said, a little too loud. “No, Gaston is--no. He’s not the father.”

“Oh.” Mary Margaret sounded like she was trying to hide her disappointment. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed. I just saw the way he looked at you and thought, maybe you had looked back.”

Belle shook her head. Gaston  _ had _ made no secret of the fact that he would happily give her the most adequate sexual experience of her life. But Belle had never had  _ any _ desire to take him up on that. It seemed she was destined for someone who looked at her with more eyes than Gaston ever could. 

“Yeah, no. I--I do want to reconnect with the father. But that’s not Gaston.”

“Who is it, then? Somebody from around here?”

There was no doubt that Mary Margaret had a rough idea of all the men who lived within fifty kilometers of her station. Belle couldn’t say that the father was a Queensland local. She had never expected to have this conversation, so she had never thought up a cover story for why she needed to meet someone on a part of the continent where she basically knew no one. 

“I… actually met him on the flight on the way in, before I got to the station all those months ago. So I thought maybe he lived somewhere around here.”

Mary Margaret’s eyes went completely round. “On the flight?”

Belle could hear all the words Mary Margaret was heroically keeping to herself:  _ You slept with someone you had just met? Without exchanging phone numbers? Without protection? In an airplane?! _

“Yeah…” Belle said. While the reality laid out in this lie may have been more pleasant than the truth, it didn’t make her look any more responsible than what had really happened. A person who had a one-night stand and joined the Mile High Club  _ at the same time _ was not exactly a paragon of fit parenting.

“I mean it’s okay,” Mary Margaret assured her. “I’m just worried that you’re pinning a lot of hopes on this person you don’t know anything about.”

“I don’t,” Belle admitted. “I don’t know where he lives or even what his name is. I--I have no idea how to find him.”

“Well, it’s like I always say, if you love someone, and they love you, you’ll find your way to each other.” 

Belle tried to believe that. Tried to believe that love could be any part of what was going on. 

“But--we were talking about  _ your _ baby, the first one.” Belle shifted the topic from one unplanned pregnancy back to the other. “What did you end up doing?”

Gracefully, Mary Margaet accepted Belle’s abrupt change of subject. “There was a convent a few towns over from the college. We talked with the Mother Superior and she helped us make arrangements to place Emma for adoption.” She took a deep breath, steeling herself for the memories. “There was a stack of books that the families had made--like photo albums, where these couples and sometimes their kids would introduce themselves. They would say who they were and what they were about and why they wanted to adopt. We picked out a nice couple from Florida. I wanted to find a good fit for our daughter, people that would love her and raise her the way David and I would have raised her. We weren’t going to just leave her on the side of the freeway!” She smiled weakly at her own joke.

Belle tried to smile back. “How long did you have with your daughter? Before they…” She didn’t want to say the words  _ took her _ , but it was hard to think of it any other way. 

“I went to the hospital, and Emma was born on October 23. David got someone to cover his shifts at work so he could help with the birth. I tried to tell him not to, that it would hurt too much for him to be there, but he wouldn’t leave my side.” Mary Margaret took another tissue and just held it in her hands for a moment. “We had about a day, when we were a family. Emma never slept in her bassinet, both of us never wanted to stop holding her. I had finished the blanket by then, and we wrapped her in it. For a little bit, we thought we could maybe make it work. And if love was all you needed to feed and clothe a child, that baby would have wanted for nothing.” Still holding her tissue, Mary Margaret let her tears fall freely. “But then David had to leave to work an overnight shift. And I was all alone with her in the hospital, and I knew that this couldn’t last. And I  _ wanted _ her to go with her family. I knew they would love her and take care of her. I knew that this was her best chance.

“But that night, the last night I had her to myself, I didn’t sleep a wink. I just held her, and fed her out of bottles, and sang to her. I knew my time with her was running out, and I didn’t want to miss a second of it. I didn’t even want to close my eyes.” She closed her eyes now, putting her face in her hands in grief.

Belle put her hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t imagine doing that.” Her own feelings toward her offspring were nebulous, but there was no doubt that Mary Margaret had loved her baby, and that she had chosen to give her up as an expression of that love. “That was so… brave.”

Mary Margaret gave out a bitter laugh. “It didn’t feel brave. Or at least, it didn’t feel good. No one ever tells you how much doing the right thing can  _ hurt _ .”

“I’m sorry,” Belle said again. She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“I got so depressed,” Mary Margaret went on. “I barely scraped by that semester, and the next one wasn’t much better. David was the only thing that kept me from dropping out altogether. David, and… thinking about Emma. I wanted her to be proud of me, to think that her birthmother was someone worthwhile.”

“You are,” Belle said immediately. “Your daughter has a lot to be proud of with you and David.”

Mary Margaret nodded. “It took so long for us to get to a place where we felt comfortable having kids. Not just financially, but emotionally, trying to process all this grief about losing our chance with Emma.”

“Did you ever get to see her?”

“A few times, while we were still in school. It was an open adoption. Her parents would meet us at a park or a children’s museum. It hurt, every time. And then we moved here, and they mailed us pictures on her birthday.” Mary Margaret’s voice faded away. “But that all stopped once she turned eighteen.”

“Why?”

“Well, she’s an adult now. She can make her own decisions about if she wants to contact us. And… she hasn’t. Her birthday was just a few weeks ago. She’s nineteen now, the same age I was when I had her. I guess she doesn’t want to have anything to do with us.”

“That’s not true,” Belle said automatically. “I mean, I’m sure things are mixed-up in her mind too. Or she’s just busy with her own life. Or she doesn’t think you want to see  _ her _ . It doesn’t mean that she’s hostile to you. I promise, Mary Margaret, you’ll see your daughter someday.”

Mary Margaret smiled and held Belle’s hand. “Thank you,” she said. “Even if it’s not true, just believing in hope is a powerful thing.”

“You and David are good people,” Belle squeezed her hand. “Good things will happen to you. Maybe you’ll get to show Emma her little brother.”

Mary Margaret looked down at her bump. “Yeah,” she said, so softly it almost seemed like a secret, a hope to be shared only between mother and child. 

As much as she sympathized with the other woman, Belle couldn’t fight a twinge of resentment. At least Mary Margaret had adoption as an  _ option _ . And she had known the whole time that her daughter would be a normal, human girl, and that even with this other family, she would be taken care of. Baby Emma would be much easier to love than whatever was growing inside Belle.

“No one else would  _ want _ my baby.” She hadn’t realized she’d said it out loud until she saw Mary Margaret’s shocked expression.

“Oh, don’t  _ say _ that!” She clutched her hand. “Your baby is going to be  _ wonderful _ !”

“What if it’s not?” Belle gave voice to fears she had never expressed to another person. “What if there’s something wrong with this baby? What if it’s deformed or… or sick or something?”

She couldn’t admit that the baby would take after its father--a half-human spider-monster. That wasn’t an abstract fear, but a biological certainty. Belle feared she wasn’t able to care for such a creature. Was she giving it the nutrients it needed to develop in the womb? Would her body be able to go through labor to birth something so inhuman? And what would it be like once it was born? How could she feed and raise her offspring? If the role of a parent was to help a child grow up, how could she possibly know if she was helping this  _ thing _ grow into the best version of itself? 

“Every pregnancy is scary,” Mary Margaret said. “There are so many things that you don’t know--can’t know. All you can do is try your best and keep going and rely on the people that love you to help.”

“I don’t know if he loves me. The father, I mean. We didn’t exactly get to talk much.”

“Well that’s why you’re here now,” Mary Margaret assured her. “You’re going to find him, and you’re going to tell him about the baby, and then you’re going to see what he says. And it’ll probably be terrifying, I won’t kid you about that. I was nervous when I told David, and I trusted him as completely then as I do now. But it’s still scary.”

“There are so many unknown variables,” Belle said. “It’s impossible to theorize the outcome.”

“And that’s why you need to get more information!” Mary Margaret took Belle by the shoulders and looked her in the eye. “You won’t know until you talk to this man. So when are you going to start looking for him?”

Belle looked into Mary Margaret’s eyes, and summoned up all the courage she could muster. “Tomorrow,” she answered. “I’m going to start looking for him tomorrow.” 

****

It was actually the day after tomorrow when Belle loaded up her rental car with supplies and headed out to the wildness of brush and abandoned opal mines. The morning before, when she had been planning on heading out, the jet lag had finally hit. The time difference combined with pregnancy fatigue led to her spending a solid twenty hours in one of the Nolans’ guest bedrooms, either sleeping or too zonked to move.

But the day after that, Belle was up before the sun. It was cool in the morning, and she wanted to get as much of her mission done as it was possible to do before the summer heat kicked in. The Nolans had loaned her an Esky, and Belle had filled it up with ice, sandwiches, and Watermelon Chill Gatorade. 

Though she had told Mary Margaret that she was in Queensland to look for the father of her child, it was still understood that they were paying her to track down the overly-large spider that was attacking the station’s sheep. That had to be her first priority.

Only Belle knew that her sex partner and the spider were actually the same entity.

She drove along the same route she had taken with Gaston when they had first gone out to find the creature. All the Nolans’ grazing lands were on top of abandoned mines. The cave where Belle had first met the thing was an underground space the size of a cathedral. Remembering it, Belle couldn’t help but romanticize the place--shafts of light streaming through the boarded-up mine entrances; golden webs as thin as threads, but strong enough to keep her lifted up in the air; the darkness where the creature hid, a threat, yes, but mostly a mystery to be uncovered. 

Butterflies danced in her stomach, and Belle had no way to describe what she was feeling. Nervous, certainly. She was just as afraid that she  _ would _ find the creature as she was that she  _ wouldn’t _ . Would it remember her? Would it care that she was pregnant? Or would it just try to eat her? Last time she had made a deal with it, that she would be its mate instead of its meal. Maybe it wouldn’t make her the same offer this time. Animals didn’t have to be sentimental, or fair. Especially with arachnids, cannibalism was not uncommon.

It might not make a difference that she was carrying its young.

Despite her fears, Belle pulled off the dirt road at the first abandoned mine opening she saw. She parked the car and took a Gatorade out of the Esky. Pregnancy played havoc with her blood sugar and she needed to stay hydrated in this heat. Watermelon Chill hadn’t been her favorite flavor growing up, but she couldn’t get it in Storybrooke so now it tasted like home. 

Last time she was here, she had found a dead sheep and a trail of golden thread to let her know that she was on the right track. Now she had no such luck. There was nothing along the ground except for a collection of old boards hammered to form a gate to keep animals from falling into the mine below. 

Cautiously, Belle circled the covered hole. The morning sun didn’t let much light into the darkness below. Even when she brought out her torch, the electric beam only waved uselessly in the black abyss. Belle was just about to give up when the light finally caught on something. Something glinting.

Belle rested her full weight on the boards, trying to get a better look at the glint. Was it shining gold or silver? Was it just a mineral deposit? Or was it… Could it be a thread?

Suddenly, the boards broke and Belle collapsed forward into the darkness. She didn’t have time to think, didn’t even have time to scream before she was falling down into the underground cavern.

Just as fast as she had fallen, something caught her. Strong arms wrapped around her body and held her close. Belle pressed her face into the safety of the unknown. Something rough and hard rubbed against her skin, but the feeling was warm and dry, like a wool blanket. The smell of it was earthy, with a little bit of mustiness. She felt like she had been caught between the pages of an old book. 

Belle and her rescuer swung in the air, propelled by the inertia of her fall. They whipped around a central point over and over, like a carnival ride on steroids. Were they tethered on something? Swinging on a string? Instead of looking out to see, Belle buried her head in the chest of the dark figure that protected her. She tried to contain her screams--and her nausea.

Gradually, they began to slow. Their transit became smaller. It felt more like rocking now, a gentle, soothing motion. Belle took a shaking breath. It seemed to be the first time she had breathed since she’d been on the surface. She wasn’t surprised to find tears in her eyes when she touched her face. 

Once the spinning stopped, the arms relaxed their hold on her. Belle felt herself and whatever held her slowly lowering to the ground. The arms loosened, but didn’t let her go. Instead, they lifted her up into a shaft of light and a happy, familiar, inhuman voice cried out:

“Belle! Belle is back!” 


	4. Anatomy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Belle and the spider reconnect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you don't know anything about spider anatomy, this won't make a lot of sense. If you DO know anything about spider anatomy, it will make even less sense. Have fun!

Through the darkness of an underground cavern, shafts of light poured down like gold. Belle French was lifted into one of those beams, held up by the arms of an unspeakable monster. A monster with eight black eyes and dripping fangs and the happiest smile she had ever seen.

“Belle!” it cried. “Belle, you are back!”

The creature seemed so sincere, so full of joy to see her again. In spite of her better instincts, Belle found herself moved. Her heart swelled and she smiled back at him.

“Yeah,” she answered. “I’m here again. I-I didn’t know if you would remember me.”

The ridge over his top eyes furrowed. “But you are Belle,” he said. “You are mate. Forever.”

“Forever?” she squeaked. But she was more surprised than scared. “You didn’t mention that last time.”

The monster didn’t reply to that. Instead he slowly lowered his arms so that his head was directly in front of Belle’s stomach. He pressed one ear against her abdomen, moving her body around until he pushed against her bump. Then he rested. And listened.

“Hang on a second.” Belle pulled up her baggy tee shirt away from his face. The creature cocked its head in curiosity. She adjusted the fabric so the hem was now bunched up below her bra and her stomach was exposed. When she was done, it resumed the position. His face was cool and rough against her belly. The bristles of the chelicerae around its mouth tickled her as he moved. He was searching for something.

When he found it, he said, “Ah!” His whole body seemed to relax--his shoulders slumped and all of his legs went loose.

Tentatively, Belle reached out to put her hand on his head. She stroked the hair--and it  _ was _ hair, wavy and soft and brown. It reached down to his chin.

“What do you hear?” she whispered.

“Young,” he sighed. “Our young.”

“Really?” her eyes welled up. “Ours?”

“Yes.” The creature’s arms shifted. Now he wasn’t just holding her, he was hugging her. Tender and sweet and loving. He was happy she was back. He was happy she was pregnant. 

Belle had never thought that  _ anyone _ would be happy that she was going to give birth to a monster. But he wanted this baby. He  _ loved _ this baby, before it was even a full-fledged bump. She had done the right thing coming here. This creature, the father, would do anything for her or their young. She felt that truth in her bones. For just a moment, everything was okay. 

Then she started thinking.

A million questions spun around in her mind: How could this thing hear an embryo inside her body? Was it just registering the fetal heartbeat? What  _ was _ that heartbeat? Was it a healthy rate? Was the baby really okay? What else would he be able to tell her about her pregnancy? Wait--had he been  _ expecting _ her to come back pregnant?

She pushed its head away from her stomach and slapped at its shoulders to get its attention. “Put me on the ground,” she said. “I want to talk to you, face to face.”

The spider-thing obeyed her without complaint. But once Belle was on the stone floor of the cave, it crawled up to the center of its massive, golden web. The monster towered over her. Belle had to crane her neck and squint to see it outlined in the half-light.

Not exactly face to face. 

Pulling her shirt down again, Belle crossed her arms over her chest. Pregnancy had made her breasts swell up and her nipples become more sensitive--and she really didn’t want to be distracted by that sort of thing right now. For all its fond feelings, this creature had turned her life upside down. Before anything else happened, she would give him a piece of her mind. 

“So,” she began firmly. “You know that I’m pregnant--that I’m going to have one of your ‘young,’ as you call it.”

“Yes.” The echoey answer came down from the shadows of the cave. 

Out of sheer irritation, Belle began to tap her foot. “Did you  _ plan _ for that to happen?”

“Yes.”

Her mouth fell open. “Yes?” she repeated. “You  _ wanted _ me to conceive and carry your offspring? And you didn’t see fit to  _ tell _ me about it?”

“I told.” The voice sounded indignant. “We made a deal. You agreed.”

“I did  _ not _ agree to--”

“You said  _ mate _ !” 

The creature rappelled down from the web on a string of golden thread until its pointed legs touched the floor. The human-looking head and torso rose up from a spider’s cephalothorax. A ridged shell of exoskeleton covered his back and shoulders down to the waist, showing only the slightest hint of a golden underbelly. Unlike his sparkly face and hands, that bit of carapace was a glossy dark brown. It almost looked like an old-fashioned frock coat. 

The shell moved with his body when he bent at the waist to look her in the eye.  _ Now _ they were face to face. It was hard to read his expression. He didn’t seem enraged, just terribly intense.

“You agreed to be my mate!”

“Yeah, but mating doesn’t mean…” 

This time, Belle stopped herself. She realized her mistake now. When she had made the deal with the creature, she had been thinking like a human. She had taken ‘mate’ to be the same as ‘fuck.’ She had thought her time with the spider had been a one night stand, no strings attached. She’d thought she’d gotten pregnant by accident.

She should have thought like an animal. So many animals only ever had sex when the female was ovulating, when conception was practically gauranteed. By agreeing to mate with him, she  _ had _ been agreeing to have his child. 

And there was the language the creature had used. There was a big difference between ‘mating’ and ‘being a mate.’ Did it really mean what it had said? Did he want her to be his mate? Forever?

Belle put her hand over her stomach. Her anger had left her, and now she felt like a deflated balloon.

“Did you really plan for me to get pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“And do you still want me around? Do you want me to have your… progeny?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” She looked into his eyes--so strange, so black, but so full of expression. “Was I just the first fertile human to ever come into this cave?”

“No,” it said simply. “Not the first.” 

Belle blinked. “Wait, have you done this before? Do you have other offspring? Are there more things like you out there in the world?”

The creature looked away from her, but didn’t crawl back into its web. “Yes,” he said after a moment. His voice seemed quiet, almost sad. “Long ago. There was another.”

“Another woman?” Belle whispered. “Another  _ human? _ ”

He nodded. “And another young.”

“But only one? Hell, do your ‘mates’ only give birth to one, um, ‘young’ at a time?”

“Yes.”

Okay then. Well, at least now Belle knew she wasn’t going to give birth to hundreds of spiderlings. Thank God for small favors. 

“What… happened to your young? It’s not in this cave, is it?” She had thought that this thing was such an anomaly, such a scientific impossibility, that there was no way there could be more than one of it. She had thought he was alone, but what if he wasn’t? Or at least, what if he hadn’t always been?

“Left.” 

There was something different about this reply. Though it was just as monosyllabic and simple as everything else the creature had said, Belle got the distinct impression that there was more to it. He wasn’t just saying one word because that was all that needed to be said. He was only saying one word because it was too painful for him to say more.

“And what about the woman?” Not only was there another creature like him out there in the world--like him and like the child she carried--but there was also another woman somewhere who had been through exactly what Belle was going through now.

“She left too,” he said. Half of his eyes looked at the ground, and the other half darted back and forth around the cave. None of them looked at her. 

“But…” Belle tried to piece together the facts. “She lived? She was pregnant with your young, and she gave birth to… something like you, and… both of them lived?”

“Yes.”

That eased a worry that Belle had barely been able to admit had been plaguing her.

“How old is your young now? How long ago did all this happen?”

“Old?” the creature cocked its head. “Long… ago?”

Belle swallowed. She had been thinking like a human again. What was time to a thing like him? Did it even have numbers that he could count seasons or years in? Why would it need them? How would this creature in the dark measure the passing of days?

“Your young,” Belle tried again. “Did it grow as big as you?”

That wouldn’t tell her exactly what she wanted to know, but it was good data anyway. If the offspring had lived to reach sexual maturity, that would at least give her an idea of what she could expect from her own young. 

“No,” the creature answered. “He was small.” 

He held out his arms in a circle near his chest. Belle recognized the gesture as cradling a baby and her heart melted a little. Then, he bent down on his spindly legs and put his hand about a meter off the floor. Belle had the image of a boy’s torso on a spider’s body, running and playing around this cave, learning to spin webs just like its father. Finally, the creature raised itself up a little higher, so that its hand was two meters above the ground. So the young had grown up to be about two-thirds the size of the creature. For some reason, Belle thought of a young teenager, maybe a fourteen year old boy.

She wondered what the young had looked like. Not just how many legs or eyes he’d had, but things like what color his hair had been. Was his chin as pointed as his father’s? Did his eyebrows furrow in the same way? Did the young look like his mother at all?

Would her child look like its big brother?

Belle looked around the cave and found a rock to sit on. So many revelations in such a short time had worn her out. She rested her face in her hands.

The creature came over to her. “Belle?”

“I’m tired,” she explained. “I’m tired all the time now. I don’t like being pregnant.”

He swallowed. Was he nervous? “You don’t want young?”

“What?” Belle looked up.

The creature had its hands drawn up close to its chest. Her first thought was of a praying mantis about to strike. But then she realized that his fingers were moving. They rubbed together in a way that almost looked like fidgeting.

Was he nervous?

He circled the cave on his many legs, up and down the walls. His head wove around like he had something very important to look at just over there, nowhere near her. Belle read this behavior as evasion. She had never seen it in a predator before. 

He had made a complete circuit around before he spoke again.

“Will you… leave?”

Belle’s shoulders slumped. She knew what she had to say, and she knew that he didn’t want to hear it. Surprisingly, she didn’t really want to say it either.

“I’ll have to, eventually. People will worry if I just disappear. And I need food and water and--” she looked down at her belly “--medicine, I think. I still don’t know what to do about a doctor knowing what I’m pregnant with.”

“Stay.” It was looking at her now. All of his dark eyes were wide and full. “Please stay, Belle.”

She looked at the ground. When was the last time someone she’d fucked had even asked her to stay the  _ night _ ? Let alone stay for… however long he wanted her to stay. Forever? The time they had spent together could be measured in hours. It was  _ not _ the stuff of a lifetime commitment!

And yet...

“I--” she didn’t know what to say. “I do have to go back tonight. The people I’m staying with will worry about me if I don’t come back.  _ Everyone _ will worry about me if I just fall off the face of the earth. Do-do you understand that? I’m not alone. There are other humans who care about me, and I care about them.”

He turned his head. “I… care about you.” His voice was soft and muffled.

“I know.” 

Belle heaved herself off the rock and took a few steps under his legs. He was so large, she felt like she was in a cave within a cave. Over her head, his oblong abdomen was smooth and dark, with a slight pattern of speckles. Though he wasn’t yellow, she understood why another name for  _ nephila _ was “banana spider.” Tentatively, she reached up to touch the underside of his exoskeleton. It was almost a shell, cool and hard, with patterns of bumpy ridges breaking up the smoothness. 

His legs scuttled in place as she touched him, and Belle withdrew her hand. “Was that alright?”

For a moment, the creature didn’t speak. Then, from high above her head, Belle heard the answer: “Yes.”

She raised her hand again, pressing the flat of her palm against him. “Does this feel good?”

Again, a long moment before he answered. She had the oddest idea that his hesitance wasn’t just reluctance to speak. Maybe he genuinely didn’t know if the sensations he was experiencing were actually pleasant or not. She couldn’t shake the thought that this creature had never been touched gently before. Or at least, it had been so long that the experience was strange.

“Yes,” he said at last.

Slowly, gently, Belle began to rub the shell of his abdomen segment. She tried to be soothing. Would he be soothed? Would he know that that was what she wanted?

Without thinking about it, her other hand drifted down to her belly. She touched the bump that barely even existed, the life inside her that only he knew was really there. She rubbed them all--her lover, her child, and herself. They were an odd and unnatural family, but she could not deny their connection. 

“Can you tell me about the woman before?” She couldn’t say why that was the thought at the forefront of her mind. She just knew she wouldn’t have any peace until she was able to resolve it. “What was her name?”

Again, the legs shifted, uncertain. “Didn’t say.”

Belle blinked. “She didn’t tell you? But she mated with you? She agreed, just like I did?”

“No,” it said softly. “Not like you. She… wanted. She… offered.”

Belle blinked again. Wow.  _ She _ had made a deal for this thing to fuck her as an alternative to having it eat her. But this other woman… Had she really fucked a giant spider just for the hell of it? And she didn’t tell him her name?

Belle moved forward along his body. At the junction between the abdomen and the cephalothorax, there was a ridged orifice. Belle recognized it as a gonopore, the hole where sperm came from. Her mind filled up with facts from classes she had taken: Male spiders didn’t have penises. They scooped sperm up with special limbs called pedipalps and jammed them securely into the female’s genital opening, called an epigyne. 

In their particular case, this creature had impregnated her by filling up her vagina with his hand. That hand had obviously been covered in sperm. The process had resulted in the single most mind-blowing orgasm of her life. 

Odd as it was, she could understand how a person would deliberately seek out an experience like that, even at the hands of a monster. Perhaps the other woman had known or guessed what this spider would be capable of. Mating like this brought intense physical pleasure to a human woman. Belle knew that from experience. 

Did the creature get anything out of it, besides young? There hadn’t been any kind of climax for him. Arachnid procreation was mostly about a male pleasing a much larger female enough to avoid being eaten. Was there any pleasure in it for males? Belle looked up at the gonopore again. What kind of sensation could he feel there? Would that be an erogenous area? Should she touch it? Had the other woman touched it?

“Did she talk to you like I do?”

“No,” the creature said. “She… presented her body to me. We mated. She left, like you did. Then she came back. She was… rounder than you are. I heard the young clearly. She shouted and made noise at me. She called me Monster, Animal. Beast.”

_ But you are _ , Belle bit back the words. She lowered her hands away from the creature’s body. Walking out from underneath his cephalothorax, she looked at his face again.

He looked so sad.

“The other,” he went on. “She stayed. She had the young. Then she left. She left him here.”

Belle laid her hand on her stomach. She could have sympathy for a woman who found herself with both an inhuman child and a monster that wanted to mate for life. But it felt cruel for that woman to just leave both of them without a word of explanation.

“And in all that time you were together, she never told you her name?”

“No.”

“Did she name the baby--the young?”

“No.”

“Did you?” she asked. “Did you give your child a name?”

He cocked his head and made a noise, a sort of chittering chirp, more a song than a word. Belle tried to work out syllables that she could repeat into English.

“Bae-el-fi-re?”

His black eyes lit up in excitement. “Yes!” he cried. “Baelfire! Bae! That was my young.”

The joy and love in his voice almost brought Belle to tears. She couldn’t help but wonder how he would sound saying the name of their child, whenever they picked out a name. She had already told this creature her name. And she was damned if she wouldn’t name her child.

It was at that moment that Belle realized she wouldn’t leave him. Not forever. She couldn’t hurt him the way that other woman had.

“Will you--” Belle began, but then stopped herself. She started over again. “The last time I was here, I asked what your name was, and I didn’t quite understand it. Will you tell it to me again?”

He obliged her with another noise, a mess of garbled R and L sounds. She tried to piece it together. “Rum...ple-something? Rumple?”

He smiled at her. “Yes.” His voice was soft now. He sounded grateful.

“I know that’s not all of it, but it’s the best I can do for now.”

“Belle,” he whispered. His legs bent down so that his body lay flat on the ground. From this height, his face was only a few inches higher than hers.

She wanted to ask him more. She wanted to know what had happened to his other young, what was going to happen to her, what kind of name he would like for their child. These were all important questions, but in that moment nothing was more important than the simple act of being with him. Of staying.

She reached out to him. Earlier, she had been fascinated by the parts of him that were arachnid. Now she wanted to touch the parts of him that were human. She put her hand on his shoulder. The hard exoskeleton looked almost like a jacket, like a long coat made of crocodile leather. 

The creature--Rumple--didn’t pull away from her touch. Instead, he inched closer. His own hands hung in the air between their bodies. It was clear he wanted to touch her, but couldn’t dare to yet. 

So Belle took another step forward. “Do you…” There wasn’t really an easy way to ask this. “Can you mate now, even if we’ve already mated?”

Now it was his turn to blink. All eight eyes did so at a different time, and the effect was like a display of Christmas lights creating the illusion of movement on a static surface. 

“Why?” he asked. Was it her imagination, or did he sound breathless?

She moved her hand from his shoulder to his neck, to his face. She brushed one of his chelicerae with the back of her knuckles. The inner bristles there were surprisingly soft. He shuddered at the touch.

“For pleasure,” Belle answered. “We can do it because it feels good. Because it’s the only thing that does feel good in this crazy world.”

With agonizing slowness, Rumple brought his hand up to her face. He touched her cheek. His long, sharp, claws ran against her skin without the slightest hint of pain.

Belle closed her eyes and smiled. 

“She... the other… she wanted pleasure.”

Opening her eyes, Belle put her hand on top of his. “What do  _ you _ want?”

He looked at her. All of his round, black eyes stared at her for a long moment before he answered: “Pleasure.” 

Her breath quickened, but Belle nodded. This was happening, and she wanted it to happen. She was going to fuck a spider. 

Again.

If he were a man, she would have kissed him now. But his chelicerae made his mouth oddly wide. More than that, the fangs and venom housed  _ within _ his chelicerae were more of a hazard than Belle could manage right now.

Rumple seemed to know it. As they got closer to each other, he raised his head up so she could nestle underneath his chin. Her arms wrapped around his neck and his arms went around her waist and they held each other.

And it felt so good.

Eyes shut, Belle felt the tears welling up. But she wasn’t sad now. No, she was overwhelmed with an absurd feeling of safety, of peace. With her mind and her body, whatever happened, she would be alright. As long as she was with Rumple, as long as they were together, somehow things would turn out okay. 

She wasn’t just going to fuck a spider, she was going to  _ make love _ to Rumple. Whatever he was, whatever their child would be, whatever happened to her career or her future--they were together.

She loved him.

They stood together for a while. Their hands explored their bodies slowly, almost lazily. More than once, Belle found her hands wandering down to his gonopore. She didn’t touch it directly at first, just let her fingers graze against it. She felt like she was a teenager again--curious to find out what a guy’s boner or another girl’s pussy felt like, but also reluctant to be compelled to do anything with that knowledge once she had it.

Rumple didn’t seem to mind one way or the other. Maybe he couldn’t feel anything. Real spiders didn’t have sensory organs on their pedipalps, which could make mating a clumsy process. What was this creature’s relationship to his own body? How could she give him pleasure like he had given her?

“What can you feel?” she asked.

“Heart,” he said. His hand was on her neck and her pulse was probably racing.

Belle bit back a smile. “I mean, for yourself? Can you feel me touching you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like the way I’m touching you?”

“Yes.”

“Can I do anything more? Something different? Faster, slower? Rougher, softer? Want me to go in circles?”

That was too many questions at once, and she knew he wouldn’t answer. But he held her closer and rubbed his face in her hair.

“Do I smell good?” she whispered. She worked her hands into the inside of his carapace. His skin was soft there, and his body was warm.

“Yes,” he answered.

“What do I smell like?” She was genuinely curious as to what he would say, how he would describe his senses and whether it would mean anything to her.

“Belle,” he whispered. He always spoke her name with reverence. “You smell like Belle.”

Squeezing her eyes shut to block off another onslaught of tears, Belle pulled her free hand out of the carapace and very deliberately moved it down along his waist and into his gonopore.

Rumple gasped. His body stiffened, but Belle did not move her hand. 

“Does that hurt, Rumple?”

“No.” His voice was different. One of his hands twisted in her tee shirt.

“You have to tell me if I hurt you. I’ve never done this before and I don’t want to get it wrong.”

Gently, he pulled her head back so they were looking at each other, face to face. “You too,” he said softly. “If I hurt you.”

“I’ll tell you,” Belle nodded. “If we do this right, we’ll both end up feeling  _ very _ good.”

One hand was still in her shirt. He pulled at it, not roughly. “Sheer?” he offered.

Belle snorted at the word they had used last time for the act of her taking off her clothes. Strange that the other woman hadn’t taught him about clothing. Had she not worn any when she was around him? Was she a nudist? Or just a woman on a mission who wouldn’t let even a millimeter of fabric get between her body and the monster she wanted to fuck?

Nothing good would come of thinking about that woman now. Backing away from Rumple just a bit, Belle pulled her shirt over her head and unhooked her bra. Her nipples stood out from her breasts, hard and red as gumdrops. Pregnancy and arousal had an odd combination of effects on her body. 

The creature cocked his head at her. He seemed surprised by how different she looked from the last time he had seen her. 

Belle sat on the stone ground to take off her shoes and socks. “My body is going to be changing a lot between now and when the baby comes. So don’t get too attached to me looking just one way.”

“Beautiful,” was all he said when she pulled off her shorts and stood naked in front of him. “Always.”

She swallowed. For about the thousandth time, Belle remembered what a truly fucked up situation she had found herself in. She was talking to a giant spider. She cared what the spider thought about her appearance. She was relieved when the spider said he would always find her beautiful. She was looking forward to having an “always” with a motherfucking spider. 

Stepping toward Rumple, Belle reached out her hand to touch his gonopore again. There was a ridge around the opening, made of a hard, shell-like material. The bumps were rounded and smooth. They felt good against her hand.

She applied a little pressure and the creature’s breath hitched. 

“Nice,” Belle said out loud.

For all her horny bravery, Belle wasn’t ready to dive directly into the orifice where his sperm came from. It was wet and sticky, even more so than any of the fluids she normally associated with sex. That kind of mess would be more appropriate for a third date. But the ridge… She could work with that ridge. And it would give him pleasure too. 

“Can you pick me up again?”

Of course he could. Of course his strength was inhuman. He held her in his arms and Belle wrapped her legs around his waist. Her pussy opened up to him, flush against his body. Her wetness left a shine against his dark brown shell.

“What do you want?” he asked her.

With one hand, she held onto his arm. With the other, she brushed back a lock of his hair. Her fingers trailed down to his cheek.

“I want to ride you,” she answered. “I want you to hold me up with your arms so I stay pretty much where I am right now. If you think you might drop me,  _ please _ stop and put me down and we’ll think of something else to do.”

“I will!” he promised. God, he was so sincere, so heartfelt. 

Belle adjusted her position so that the ridge around his gonopore was pushing directly against her pussy. The hard, round bumps pressed against her clitoris and her vagina at the same time. 

“Oh, fuck yes,” she whispered. She rocked her hips against him. “Do you feel that? Do you like that feeling?”

Rumple’s arms clutched around her and he held her tight against his body. “ _ Yes _ .”

“Good.” Her breathing was heavy. “I’m going to keep moving like this, over and over, until I can’t do it anymore. I’m going to try to come. Do you remember, last time, when you made me come? You did it four times.”

“Yes.” He didn’t have hips, exactly, but his lower half jerked forward, as though he was being led by his gonopore into her body.

She chuckled. “And if there’s anything I can do for you--any way you want me to touch you or move against you--just let me know.” Belle looked into his eyes, all eight of them. “I want you to enjoy this too.”

He nodded, and she began to grind. 

The bumps between her legs really were perfect for this. They were large enough that she could feel them, but not so penetrating that it was uncomfortable. Her movements did an excellent job of  _ not _ satisfying her--they always left her wanting more. 

Unlike so many times with men, Belle felt like she was in control of her pleasure. She wanted to make Rumple feel good, but there was no demand, no urgency. Sometimes fucking a cock felt like a race against time, like she was there to satisfy  _ it _ , like the male climax was the point of sex and her own pleasure only existed to make a man horny.

But this was more like fucking a woman, when orgasms were a nearly inexhaustible resource and lovers could spend hours trading pleasure back and forth between them. They had nothing but time, her and Rumple. They would have  _ forever _ to learn the mysteries of each other’s bodies. They would have  _ always _ .

No one--man or woman--had ever promised her that before. 

Her legs tightened around his waist, and Belle found herself clenching, the orgasm rising up out of her. She clung to Rumple as she came, bracing herself against his chest. As she came down from the first of what would be many highs, she looked up at his face. His eyes were even rounder and blacker than before.

“Belle,” was all he said.

“Rumple.” She gave him a sated smile and rested her head on his chest again. Then she told him something she had never said to anyone else before: “I love you.”


End file.
